| Abstract | testimonies about "nearness," "contact," "emanation," "vestige," "trace," "co-substantiality" and so on, register a sense that photographs of things can [obtain] a strong manifestation function as well. It is important to emphasize that they can; not must.... It will be of little interest if the subjects of a packet of vacation snaps shown to us by an acquaintance touch us (albeit only transitively) with their own rays.(13)
Out of this combination of showing and disguising we can construct a fourth and final analogy between the ways in which concentration camp photographs and religious cult images work. The icon's place is the pictorial wall, separating the altar from other parts of the church. The pictorial wall presents Christ and the saints to the believers while at the same time it hides the chancel behind it from their view. Even if the religious connotations of the icon are still effective in the photographs -- the "belief," for example, in the photograph's power of pure denotation -- a very sharp distinction has to be made here as well. The invisible element of the icon is something that is not produced but metaphysically presupposed. What photographs represent, however, is purely from this world -- even though the depicted object seems to suggest otherwise. There is no absolute "evil" equivalent to the "inner sanctum" which the icon wall represents and hides -- no "evil" which could be illustrated in the photographs from concentration or extermination camps. Such a "negative theology" of [Auschwitz] would be nothing more than an attempt to create meaning where no meaning can be discerned. "Auschwitz is the source of the universalization of fear -- the name stands for the suspicion that the individual is worthless, that nothing and nobody will come to help him."(20) This, however, is hard to endure. The longing for meaning finds an expression in the perception of concentration camp photographs as "icons."
The photographs represent a difficult discrepancy. On the one hand they depict the crimes themselves. The Nazis themselves carefully attempted to obliterate the traces of their crimes, destroying clear evidence of the mass extermination and murdering the witnesses. The events and our knowledge of them, however, explode our power of imagination precisely because of the monstrous character of the organizational structure, the extent and the brutality of the crimes. Crimes of this sort demand evidence. This may be the reason why the characterization of "photographs as traces of something which actually existed" seems so convincing and why photographs of the concentration camps or pictures actually or potentially relating to the crimes in general were and still are endowed with a special power of evidence (or, for that matter, are particularly severely attacked by revisionists). On the other hand the photographs show only a fraction of the actual crimes committed. The medium's "objectivity" continues to come into conflict with the "unreal," the "incomprehensible" character of the events which they represent.
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