Images malgré tout

Images malgré tout

Cliché 280 from the series of photographs known as those of the Sonderkommando (detail). The photograph was taken in August 1944 from inside the gas chamber of Auschwitz's Crematorium V.
Author	Georges Didi-Huberman
Language	French
Subject	Shoah
Published	2004
Publication place	France

Images malgré tout is a work by Georges Didi-Huberman, published in 2004 by Éditions de Minuit.

Context

Image 280 from the series known as the Sonderkommando photographs (detail). The photograph was taken in August 1944 from inside the gas chamber of Crematorium V at Auschwitz. The first part of the book, Images malgré tout, is a text written by Didi-Huberman on the occasion of the exhibition Mémoire des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazis (1933–1999) in 2001 at the Hôtel de Sully. It was also published that same year in the collective exhibition catalog, directed by historian Clément Chéroux. The text focuses on four photographs taken clandestinely at Crematorium V by Auschwitz prisoners assigned to the Sonderkommando, who smuggled them out of the camp with the help of the Polish resistance.

For the author, these rare images, described as "four scraps of film torn from hell," are the only ones, taken by men doomed to death—the members of the Sonderkommando were systematically killed because they knew too much—that allow a glimpse of what was happening: "The unimaginable is made visible, irrefutably. There is no way for the eye or memory to escape what was captured on these negatives." Didi-Huberman concludes that these saved photos are "infinitely precious," especially since they require "the effort of an archeology"—observation, meditation, interrogation.

The exhibition was well received by critics but quickly sparked controversy, with Claude Lanzmann weighing in on January 18, followed by Gérard Wajcman and Élisabeth Pagnoux for Les Temps modernes (where Lanzmann had been director since 1986). Didi-Huberman's 2004 book revisits his 2001 text, supplementing it with an essay titled Malgré l’image toute, which responds to his critics.

Thesis

Reading of the Sonderkommando Photographs

The author first offers a phenomenological reading of the four clandestine photographs taken by Auschwitz Sonderkommando prisoners in August 1944.

"Didi-Huberman builds his approach to the image, opposing Panofsky's iconology focused on readability, with a phenomenology of the gaze: it’s an approach that understands the image in its process of gradually and incompletely becoming visible. [...] The question of visibility is at the heart of the Shoah, at the intersection of seeing and knowing. Didi-Huberman points out that there were two photographic labs inside Auschwitz, allowing him to speak of a 'pornography of killing'; the deportees saw, the SS saw; the divide between the extermination camp and the executioner’s family home was a mechanism of splitting; some who lived near the camp did not want to see, or turned a blind eye, while deniers refuse to see."

For Didi-Huberman, some members of the Sonderkommando did everything they could to preserve their testimonies, fighting against erasure, invisibility, and final disappearance, as well as against ignorance. Faced with the certainty of imminent death and the future impossibility of imagining the reality of the genocidal process, it was in the "fold of these two impossibilities—the upcoming disappearance of the witness and the definite unrepresentability of the testimony—that the photographic image emerged. One summer day in 1944, the Sonderkommando members felt the overwhelming necessity, so dangerous for them, to snatch a few photographs from their infernal work to bear witness to the specific horror and scale of the massacre."

Controversy

Claude Lanzmann's critique was first aimed at the 2001 exhibition as a whole. He denounced "the risk of mixing everything up, of not establishing hierarchies" as the exhibition explored the camps chronologically: first the camp period (1933–1945), then liberation (1945), and finally the memory period (1945–1999). He criticized Didi-Huberman's text for its "unbearable interpretive pedantry" and accused him of fetishizing the four images. More broadly, Lanzmann expressed distrust towards historical archives, arguing that photography is incapable of conveying truth.

Gérard Wajcman, in Les Temps modernes issue 613, followed up on this debate in an article titled On Photographic Belief. This controversy had already surfaced in 1998, when Wajcman clashed with Jean-Luc Godard over the representation of the Shoah. Élisabeth Pagnoux, in the same issue, wrote an analysis titled Photographer-Reporter at Auschwitz. Le Monde described both articles as harsh critiques.

In the second part of his book, Malgré l’image toute, Didi-Huberman refutes these criticisms. He argues that Wajcman, Pagnoux, and Lanzmann rely on the idea of the unspeakable and unrepresentable: if what happened in the extermination camps defies understanding, then no image or word can truly convey such horror. In this debate over the archive and its status, as well as the relationship between image, knowledge, and history, Didi-Huberman maintains that the image must be seen for what it is—an archive that shows a fragment of reality. The image is always in a "dialectical work" between showing and hiding: it does not show everything, nor does it conceal everything. Thus, "it is enough to have once looked at this fragment of an image, this erratic corpus of images malgré tout, to understand that it is no longer possible to speak of Auschwitz in absolute terms—generally well-intentioned, seemingly philosophical, but in reality lazy—of the unspeakable and the unimaginable."

The controversy reignited in 2004 when Jacques Henric, writing for Art Press, defended Didi-Huberman's work, arguing that the author, building on but surpassing the 2001 debate, develops a reflection on the nature and power of the image. Élisabeth Pagnoux published a right of reply in the same issue.

The controversy itself became a subject of study in 2014.

Legacy

In 2011, Georges Didi-Huberman published Écorces, where he revisits the themes of history, memory, and images, though in a very different style, using the "photo-essay" format to narrate a contemporary wandering.

In 2015, Didi-Huberman's work was described as a "classic" of philosophical and historical reflection. In 2018, Jacques Munier of France Culture remarked, "How can the unimaginable be documented through resources that appeal to the imaginable, and what status should we grant them in historical knowledge—particularly as archives? These were the questions debated by the philosopher in Images malgré tout."

In 2019, Images malgré tout was translated into Hebrew and published in Israel with the support of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

Bibliography

• Clément Chéroux, Mémoire des camps : Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazis (1933-1999), Paris, Marval, 2001, 246 p. ISBN 2-86234-319-6.
• Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, Paris, 2004, 241 p. ISBN 9782707318589, lire en ligne [archive]).