A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo, Richard Raskin (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004), 192 pp., pbk. 33.00
Richard Raskin’s spare and meticulous study—which, as the author points out, “may well be the first book devoted to a single photograph” (p. 5)—begins with a kind of visual experiment. How well do we really know that most famous of images bequeathed to us by the Holocaust era, commonly called the “W...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2006
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| In: |
Holocaust and genocide studies
Year: 2006, Volume: 20, Issue: 2, Pages: 309-311 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Richard Raskin’s spare and meticulous study—which, as the author points out, “may well be the first book devoted to a single photograph” (p. 5)—begins with a kind of visual experiment. How well do we really know that most famous of images bequeathed to us by the Holocaust era, commonly called the “Warsaw Ghetto boy”? As evidence of a problem in public perception, Raskin cites Peter L. Fischl’s poem inspired by the photograph in question, “To the Little Polish Boy Standing with His Arms Up.” In the poem, Fischl describes the boy this way: “The Star of David / on your coat / Standing in the ghetto / with your arms up / as many Nazi machine guns / pointing at you.”1 Of course, in the original photograph, there is no star on the boy’s coat, and no more than one gun pointed in his direction. |
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| ISSN: | 1476-7937 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Holocaust and genocide studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/hgs/dcl006 |