ARTICLE On Photographing Nazi Camps Gary Weissman ABSTRACT This essay examines how fne-art photographs taken of former Nazi camps may foster or discourage critical engagement with how we and others—individuals, communities, nations—visualize, conceptual- ize, and memorialize the Holocaust. It discusses James Friedman’s “12 Nazi Concentration Camps” as an exceptional body of work that breaks with how the camps are typically photographed: namely, as spaces of remembrance frozen in time, bereft of color and human life. Unlike images that portray the camps as silent, still, and vacant, Friedman’s color photographs present the memorial camps as curi- ous social spaces in which people—foreign tourists, local residents, children on school trips, workers, soldiers, Holocaust survivors, and a photographer among them—may interact. Through an examina- tion of work by photographers who made pictures of the camps in the closing decades of the twentieth century, including Friedman, Erich Hartmann, and Dirk Reinartz, and a recounting of the author’s own experience of photographing the camps at that time, this essay argues against efforts to fx the Holocaust in properly commemora- tive images. Keywords: Holocaust, photographs, camps, Auschwitz In November 2016, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion occasioned by “12 Nazi Concentration Camps,” an exhibition of James Friedman’s photographs of former Nazi camps at the Skirball Museum in Cincinnati. 1 In preparation, I went to view the show with some appre- hension; I had seen fne-art photographs of the memorial camps taken by photographers before—black-and-white images of barren landscapes, Shofar 37.1 (2019): 9–40