Documentary photography as a form of an author's statement about an event: the specifics of George Kadish's photo cycle

George Kadish (1910–1997) was a Lithuanian Jew, photographer, and survivor of the Kaunas ghetto. For several years, he secretly documented the daily lives of ghetto prisoners. The object of research in this article is a series of photographs by George Kadish, taken in the Kaunas ghetto in the period from 1941 to 1944, and the subject of the study is the form of the author's statement about the event in documentary photography. The article proposes to analyze Kaddish images from the point of view of the duality of documentary photography as a direct and indirect statement about an event. The article pays special attention to the second type of documentary, which refers not only to the photograph itself, but also to the event as a whole, allowing the analysis of photography to go beyond its own framework. The proposed visual analysis is based on the Didi-Huberman approach. In analyzing the images, he pays special attention to the depicted space and random details, as well as the practice of photographing itself. This approach allows not only to describe the photos, but also to expand the possibilities of understanding them. The novelty of this study lies in the application of the Didi-Huberman methodology to the photographs of George Kadish. Within the framework of the analysis proposed in the article, several subject groups of photographs are considered. It is especially important to pay attention to those elements in the photo that may seem insignificant and uninformative at first glance. The article attempts to give these photographs a special witness status. They appear not only as fixed moments of that reality, but as the concentration of the prisoners' experience, which is never fully expressed. The article presents the point of view that these photographs appear to us, on the one hand, as fragments of individual experience, and on the other – as part of the collective experience of the Holocaust.