Remediating Holodomor Photography

New article by Charley Boerman and Clara Vlessing.

Remediating Holodomor photography: Frames of violence in the afterlives of famine, just published in the journal Memory Studies

The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor, was denied and covered up by the USSR at the time. Since the late twentieth century, the cultural remembrance of the famine has been marked by a tension between censorship and the disclosure of evidence. Against this backdrop, there has been a drive to retrieve, authenticate and circulate photographs of the famine that draws from the medium’s longstanding associations with veracity. Drawing from scholarship on the memory of famine and on photography of suffering, we analyse photographs from Alexander Wienerberger’s (1891–1955) ‘Innitzer’ album to ask: how are these images remediated in line with different political interpretations and reconstructions of the 1932–1933 famine? This article finds that, through the historicising and affective use of text, sound and visual juxtapositions, Wienerberger’s photographs have been increasingly framed to solicit reactions of belief, understanding and outrage, as they are progressively used as evidence of state violence.

The article is open access. You can read and download it here.