Critical and Contextual analysis

Fine art photography is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist.

Fine art photography is a visual art which products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content.

Punctum: the thing in an image that draws the eye like the baton and the badge in the image below
Studium: the aesthetics of an image, what makes it attractive, how it is lit etc
Connotation: the implied meaning of the image
Denotation: the literal meaning of the image

In this image we are looking at two boys playing in the Lodz Ghetto which is a ghetto in Poland. It is where a lot of Jewish people lived before they were taken to concentration camps. This photograph was taken in the 1940's during the second world war, when there was a stigma around Jewish people, especially in Germany.

The photograph is of two Jewish children playing, Grossman directed his camera to children playing in the streets and to people working, he wanted to show emotion there rather than just on stage where he previously took photographs. Grossman wanted the world to understand what happened in the ghetto so he took photographs as testimony to what happened so that the whole world could understand, without language barriers.

The connotation of this photograph is that they have been born into this hierarchy, believing this is the right way to behave and that they are lesser than the Germans. The boy wearing the uniform is dressed alike to a Nazi, he is wearing a badge like the Nazis did and he is holding a baton to show control and power over the other child. We think these are the punctums of this image, the photograph would be completely different without the baton and the badge, it would have no negative connotations. This could signify that the way that children are raised changes how they act later in life, for example someone who is raised hating Jewish people might always have some hatred towards them, even if they are living in a more accepting society, this is similar to the hatred LGBT+ people face, although the majority of young people are accepting, a lot of older people and many of their children show a lot of homophobia still.

The denotations of this image is that it shows one child being in charge of the other, they are probably just playing dress up and it is very innocent for them as they are young and don't understand, however for the adults it is probably quite upsetting seeing children that are so used to this kind of controlling violence. It could be seen as dark humour, because the children don't know how hurtful this could've been. The audience might've been made to believe that one of the children are German, because of the contrast between the two, one of the boys is wearing a uniform whilst the other is wearing normal clothes.

Before he took photographs of the people in the grotto, he took photo's of a show that had come to visit, he was an amateur photographer then, he decided to try and take more photographs and when he developed the images that he had taken at the stage show, 'he was astonished by the power of his photographs, he had actually succeeded in arresting men in motion.' He then decided to take his camera to the streets to capture emotions among the children playing in the streets and the labourers working in the factories.

'His photographs gained a measure of respect, and Mendel received recognition as an artist-photographer. He was approached to make an album of the Jewish children living in the grotto.

How has your research informed your knowledge of life in the Jewish grottos:

I didn't actually know much of the Jewish grottos before reading the Mendel Grossman essay on the holocaust research project website. I only really knew about the concentration camps, by reading this essay and another one about the Lodz grotto in general, I know much more about the conditions there than I did before, the Lodz grotto was created in 1939, the majority of the people living there were from the surrounding areas, however in later years, people were taken there from other European countries like Germany and Berlin.

How has your research helped you in recognising photography as a documentary tool:

It has helped me recognise photography as a documentary tool because I have learnt a lot from these photographs, previously I thought that filming something would be better but I think that photography can work really well because you can focus on a specific moment in time.