Undoing gendered expressions of grief: Dora Kallmus' post-war 'slaughterhouse' photographs (1949-1958)

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dc.contributor.authorThomas, Kylie
dc.contributor.funderHorizon 2020en
dc.date.accessioned2023-02-09T14:28:42Z
dc.date.available2023-02-09T14:28:42Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.date.updated2023-02-08T22:11:55Z
dc.description.abstractIn 1907, the Jewish Austrian photographer Dora Kallmus, also known as Madame d'Ora, established what was to become one of the most important photography studios in Vienna. In the 1920s, Kallmus opened a studio in Paris, where she excelled as an innovative fashion photographer, creating portraits of the leading cultural figures of her time. This article centres on the dramatic shift in the images Kallmus created in the aftermath of the Second World War, when she photographed people in refugee camps in Austria and dying and dead animals in the abattoirs of Paris where she spent the final decade of her life. In order to understand these photographs and their powerful affective charge, it is necessary to consider them not only in relation to her pre-war works, but to read them in the context of the Holocaust, an event that effectively destroyed both her life and her social world. I read these images as an expression of Kallmus' views on society and the practice and meaning of photography in the aftermath of the death camps, and compare them to Hannah Arendt's post-war thought. Kallmus' 'slaughterhouse' series not only reveals the photographer's own psychic pain but also insists on a confrontation with the painful truth of the Shoah. Society's desire to avoid this painful reckoning, I argue, provides a reason for why this series has been largely ignored for the last six decades.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationThomas, K. (2022) 'Undoing gendered expressions of grief: Dora Kallmus' post-war 'slaughterhouse' photographs (1949-1958)', L'Homme. European Journal of Feminist History, 33(2), pp. 57-79. doi: 10.14220/lhom.2022.33.2.57en
dc.identifier.doi10.14220/lhom.2022.33.2.57en
dc.identifier.eissn2194-5071ISSN
dc.identifier.endpage79en
dc.identifier.issn1016-362X
dc.identifier.issued2en
dc.identifier.journaltitleL'Homme. European Journal of Feminist Historyen
dc.identifier.journaltitleL’Homme. Europäische Zeitschriftfür FeministischeGeschichtswissenschaftde
dc.identifier.startpage57en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/14199
dc.identifier.volume33en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherV&R unipressen
dc.relation.projectinfo:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020::MSCA-IF-EF-ST/838864/EU/Women, Photography and Resistance in Transnational Perspective/FEM-RESISTen
dc.rights© 2022, Verlag Brill / V&R unipress. This article is made available under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.en
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/en
dc.subjectPhotographyen
dc.subjectHolocausten
dc.subjectSlaughteren
dc.subjectGenderen
dc.subjectCommemorationen
dc.subjectHannah Arendten
dc.subjectHistoryen
dc.subjectErasureen
dc.titleUndoing gendered expressions of grief: Dora Kallmus' post-war 'slaughterhouse' photographs (1949-1958)en
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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