Further thoughts.

After rereading the last post, a lot of different points have occurred to me. These are all things that I would like to cover all be it briefly, in this project. 

1. How we interpret art.
2. What stories do we see?
3. Why do we see them that way?
4. What is the difference between subtle and graphic art? - I.e, Do we need to be bombarded with graphic images to be able to understand what is happening? Does just a subtle suggestion that lingers on our mind for maybe weeks provoke just the same amount of feeling and thinking about an artwork as it does when we are shown an artwork which is graphic and self-explainatory?
5. Does it make a difference knowing the history behind an image? I.e, does it effect our opinion of it? does is effect our experience of the image? 

After my tutorial.

After my tutorial, it became clear that I need to start looking at the language of the art that I have chosen to research. I need to start analysing the images and look at how they relate to the points above. I am still really interested in the way that people document and tell stories through their art, but as this research project has developed, I have become more aware of the different aspects that are involved in making an artwork tell a story.


The Experiment.


Also, after the question of whether knowing the story behind an image effects the way in which we interpret it that came up in my last post, I decided to experiment and ask someone to look at it who did not know the story and had never seen the image of "The Liquidation of Dr. Korczak's Orphanage" by Halina Olomucki before.


I hid all of the writing surrounding the image and the title of the piece from the person. I then asked them to tell me what they thought of the image. They said that it looked very chaotic, a group of people lining up and walking. Then I told them what the story was behind the image and it completely changed their outlook on the whole image. They used words such as, 'horrible', 'horrific', 'sad', 'heroic' and 'thought-provoking'.


Interesting Fact.


After some more online research, I actually found this website:


http://lastexpression.northwestern.edu/


which I briefly looked through. I found that the art created by the prisoners in the ghettos and Concentration and Extermination Camps was actually used in the Nuremberg Trials as evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They were used to prove the existence of the gas chambers, crematoria and the way the Nazi and SS Guards treated the prisoners.
So basically, this sums up my question that I started with. These images were not only tell the stories of the lives of the people who were persecuted during the Holocaust, but they actually were also used a documentation and evidence to help bring the persecutors to justice.

Research.

(http://www.klinebooks.com/kline/images/items/25279c.jpg)

I was walking through college about a week before Holocaust Memorial Day, which is on the 27th January every year (it marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp), and I spotted some images of the Holocaust. As I walked through the corridor and looked in the display cases which were filled with photocopying's of newspaper cuttings about the Holocaust and various survivors, photocopies of perpetrators and also images of the victims inside the concentration camps. This book, 

Art of the Holocaust

by Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton

was in one of the cabinets. After asking to borrow it for this project a few weeks later, I looked through and it's basically the most extensive collection of sketches by Survivors, POW's, various Camp inmates, people who were in hiding etc. that I have seen while I have been researching this project. I took some photocopies of many of the images in this book because they really had an effect on me. 

Each individual picture is different yet they all seem to be telling the same story, the same suffering, the same hunger and sadness and the same desperation to be freed from the Nazi grip. 

While I was looking through the book, I came across this image:

"The Liquidation of Dr. Korczak's Orphanage."

Halina Olomuck.

Pencil on yellowed paper

(Warsaw, 1941 - 43.)

This image, tells the true story of Dr. Janusz Korczak, a Polish Jew, who ran the orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was given the option to stay behind and work in the hospitals but he refused and followed his orphans into the Gas Chambers at Treblinka Death Camp.

So, here is where the answer to my argument really begins. This image is telling the story of these orphans who were sent to their death. But it is also documenting the heroic act of Dr... who refused to let the children die alone. 

However, I was already aware of this story. After my visit to Auschwitz in 2010, I got involved in the preparations for Plymouth's Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27th 2011. During this time, I met a man who works with the Plymouth Muti-Faith and Cultural Diversity Centre who told me the story of this Dr...

So this leads to another question...Does knowing the story behind an images like this one, make the experience of it any stronger? 

Does the fact that this document (the image of this event) is explained more clearly and therefore we can understand it more?

My point is that the story was very moving when I first heard it, maybe it was reinforced by my visit and own experience of Auschwitz during which I stood in the place where this man and the said children were murdered. But would someone who didn't know this story before hand react differently to the image once they were told?

Maybe this is something that I need to experiment?