Memories of grandeur were supposed to give way to images that represented the past as a criminal and barbaric time. The aim was to diffuse the grandiose images of Nazi party rallies, the Autobahns and urban architecture, organized leisure and advanced war technology, which the National Socialist-system had so successfully deployed as its vision of the present and the future. Among the various reasons for the program 'to view the atrocities,'1 it may be assumed, was the desire to replace the collective pictorial memory of the previous heroic twelve years with a new imagery, an imagery constructed with the help of photographic documentation. In the US and British zones of occupation, Germans who lived close to camp sites were made to watch, and sometimes bury, corpses while others were shown films and photographs documenting the atrocities. Images of corpses piled high, walking skeletons, dying survivors, captured guards and the sites of torture, death and cremation shocked the world-to the degree, that is, to which photographs still had the power to shock. With Camus’ Sisyphean labour and Kierkegaard’s paradox of despair and faith, I encourage photographers to be passionate while detached, focused yet restless, honest but hallucinatory, resilient and acceptant all at once.ġ The first documentary photographs and films of the mass murder of six million Jews that came to public attention were taken by soldiers and professional photographers of the Allied forces at the time of liberating the concentration and extermination camps.

But like an upthrown stone eventually meets its gravity, I must also critique their desire for linear progression in a circular world with Nietzsche’s eternal return and Camus’ absurdity. I will attempt to use existentialist ideas to combat the conundrums identified, particularly in relation to Sartre’s bad faith, Nietzsche’s death of God, Barthes’ death of author, and their will to power as well as creation of meaning. With the examples of Vilém Flusser’s analysis on apparatus, Susan Sontag’s emphasis on context, and Roland Barthes’ ‘wound’ for photographs, I will provide critical evaluation on the programmed freedom and the ontological meaninglessness in photography.

This essay will first continue James Hugunin’s essay on the relationship between Subjective Photography and Sartrean Existentialism, historically connecting photograph, photographer, and camera to being-in-itself, for-itself, and for-Others. However, there is a conundrum that eternally lies in the relationship between man and his tools, and the purpose of this essay is to investigate the issues of meaning and freedom in photography. As the photographic surface is now officially a significant part of our three-dimensional world as well as a new place in which we live, the study of the surface is now a study of our life.

Sunny europe general catalogue 2021 pdf