The Art of

148
07
Translated from
BARNOUW
Ansichten von
Deutschland, 1997,
p. 175.
The snapshot by Colonel Parke Yingst shows Margaret
Bourke-White preparing to take a photograph of the heaped
up corpses on an open trailer in Buchenwald.
horrible sight in the courtyard before
me only when I had a chance to
look at my own photographs. Using
the camera was almost a relief; it interposed
a slight barrier between
myself and the white horror in front
of me.” 06 The extent to which this
“barrier,” indeed, this distance to what
she could see that she created when
taking photographs influenced the
images themselves is demonstrated
in particular by her close-ups of the
corpses on the flatcar. According to
her estate, Bourke-White captured this motif several times on film.
As Dagmar Barnouw writes, Margaret Bourke-White was well known not
only for her technical brilliance, “her lightning-fast shots and her enormous
expenditure of film,” but also for “the compelling staging of her photographs.”
07 Taken by the photographer from an impressive perspective and
in ideal light conditions, in this photo
the naked dead bodies lying one
on top of the other do not seem anything
like decaying corpses, but instead
take on a sculptural character.
Boris Lurie plainly rejected this
type of art photography of dead
bodies. His collages Flatcar. Assemblage,
1945, by Adolf Hitler (1961) |
see image p. 20, Railroad to America
(1963) | see image p. 23 and Hard Writings
(Load) (1972) | see image p. 80 raise
the question of what exactly happened
at Buchenwald as a showplace
and the emotions with which photographers
and spectators on site
Close-up photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of the naked
corpses in the yard of the crematorium at Buchenwald concentration
camp.
and at home regarded the flatcar with its stacked-up corpses. His first work,
the offset print Flatcar. Assemblage, 1945, by Adolf Hitler, reproduces the
image of this flatcar. It does not show the sculptural staging by Bourke-
White, but a shot taken by an unknown photographer that was falsely attributed
to the famous photographer for many years. The slightly yellowing
patina of the offset print suggests that the original may also have been a
newspaper image.
In her essay “‘NO!art’ and the Aesthetics of Doom,” Estera Milman empha-
06
BOURKE-WHITE
“Dear Fatherland”,
1946, p. 73.
MIRJAM WENZEL