Image Before My Eyes [antikvár]

^ olish Jewry, once the largest Jewish community , in Europe, constituted a world center of Jewish cultural creativity for centuries. The thousand-' year history of this community is exceptionally well documented. The traditional resources of the historianwritten sources, archeological remains, art, and architecturewere supplemented in the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of photography, which introduced both a radically new kind of visual image and a new type of historical document.The hundreds of thousands of images that were created by means of the camera not only captured major historical events and important personages but also immortalized the intimate details and humblest aspects of everyday life. This very profusion of photographs, of visual eyewdtness accounts taken in innumerable places and situations, has made it possible to reconstruct in great detail the social and cultural ambiance of an era as it was seen by those who lived through it. But in order to accomplish this, the cultural historian must reckon v\dth the paradox that "before a photograph can be accepted as a document, it must itself be documented,"* as Beaumont NewhaU has stated.Though the camera does not lie, the photograph is neither value free nor does it provide more than a desituated fragment, accidentally preserved through time, of a larger picture. As John Szarkowsld has remarked, "To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft. One important way of compensating for the fragmentary character of the single photograph is to place it in the frame of reference provided by a large collection of related images and to gloss it on the basis of the materials conventionally used by the historian and the ethnographer. This is what we have attempted to do in this photographic history of Jewish life in Poland.The ten thousand photographs in the Polish collection atBeaumont NewhaU, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day, 4th ed., revised and enlarged (New York: Museum of Modem Art and George Eastman House, 1964), p. 150. tjohn Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1966), p. 70.xlil