Analysing »Photographies-without-Consent«

Analysing our visual legacy, historians often find themselves confronted with pictures that show acts of violence or the consequences of mistreatment: hurt, naked or ill people, tortured bodies, corpses. These photographs were (and some still are) taken in the contexts of police work, medicine, colonialism and especially in that of war and the aftermath of war. Often taken without or even against consent, they are frequently not accessible to the people portrayed or their descendents. How can and should historians deal with these photographic remnants? The paper discusses contributions from historians, who offer different ways of looking at »photographies-without-consent«. Their texts exemplify that the »eye of the historian« cannot be without presupposition and is itself part of the interpretation, although this is not often made explicit. Among the different questions that need to be asked is: How can the historiographical analysis be widened to include the political and ethical implications that are necessarily closely interwoven with the analysis and the presentation of photographies-without-consent?