Shoah Selfies, Shoah Selfie Shaming, and Social Photography in Sergei Loznitsa's Austerlitz (2016)

ABSTRACT:In the age of social media, controversy has regularly erupted when tourists post inappropriate photographs of themselves at Holocaust memorial sites to their social media feeds. These "Shoah selfies" subsequently trigger vitriolic online shaming when outraged, self-appointed defenders of Holocaust memory accuse selfie-takers of desecrating the memory of the dead. But while these images are usually dismissed as evidence of bad taste and a crisis of Holocaust memory among younger generations, this paper argues that both Shoah selfies and Shoah selfie shaming fulfill other, more nuanced functions. Through a reading of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Losnitza's 2016 observational documentary Austerlitz, which depicts how tourists behave and photograph on a typical summer afternoon at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, I argue that however offensive they may be, Shoah selfies must be understood as examples of "social photographs." In media theorist Nathan Jurgenson's definition, a "social photograph" is a digital image whose "existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate to its existence as a unit of communication." Within social media streams, they contribute to the photographer's ongoing narrative of self-fashioning. They also typify the rise of what Diana Popescu terms "post-witnessing," the urge to "investigate the past by undertaking a real and not only an imaginary journey of discovery" at Holocaust sites. As Shoah selfies show how new media have effected tremendous shifts in Holocaust memory, the overrepresentation of young women and effeminate men as targets of shaming show how this response to offensive Holocaust photography concurrently sustains oppressive gender hierarchies.