Migrating Images in the Digital Age: Multimodal Curation of Visual Records from the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps in Digital Infrastructures

Digital media and new forms of visual appropriation by digital means intensified the constant circulation of photographs and film footage related to historical events. Next to “classical” media such as films, paintings and graphic novels, nowadays also digital short videos or Internet memes refer to historical imagery. As migrating images, the visual records from the liberation of Nazi concentration camps inform complex and multilayered chains of references.

Aspiring to track the migration process of atrocity images, the Visual History of the Holocaust Media Management and Search Infrastructure (VHH-MMSI) includes post-1945 representations of the Holocaust alongside the historical records of the liberation, combined with comparative and multimodal curatorial approaches.
Based on direct and indirect references to liberation footage in Internet memes and TikTok videos, the presentation investigates the circulation of visual records identified with the Holocaust in popular visual culture, and demonstrates how digital curation offers new ways of relating and contextualizing migrating images of the Holocaust.
Digital collections like the repository of the Visual History of the Holocaust project offer access to dispersed and heterogeneous visual materials and provide digital tools that assist in discovering and mapping visual relations, and recognize shifts of meaning through image migration.

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Migrating Images in the Digital Age: Multimodal Curation of Visual Records from the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps in Digital Infrastructures

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