Vanderbilt Jewish Studies is co-sponsoring a lecture by scholar David Shneer entitled, “Making Grief: How a Soviet Photographer Made a Photograph of Holocaust Liberation into an Icon of War’s Human Tragedy.”

Talk description:
In 1942, Dmitrii Baltermants took some of the first images from the liberator perspective of photographs that document the Holocaust on the outskirts of the Russian city of Kerch. Twenty years later, he went back to his archive of Kerch photographs and produced Grief, what would go on to become one of his most widely published, exhibited, and purchased photographs. This talk examines why this photograph came to serve as a Holocaust photograph and how it functioned as a projection of the peace-loving Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The talk will be on Friday, March 16 at 12pm (lunch provided) in Garland Hall 101 on the Vanderbilt Campus.