709 Histor., geogr., personenbezogene Behandlung der bildenden und angewandten Kunst
As cultural products, images are infused with notions of gender – notions, which are, of course, specific to the times and places in which these images originate. For gender historians, they are fascinating artefacts, but often also frustratingly difficult to interpret. This dossier presents the work of historians who look at gender through visual sources. The contributors engage with a wide variety of visual sources (including book illustrations, posters, photographs, and comics) to explore gender history in a range of places and moments in time. Our aim is to examine how historical actors have used images as they negotiate gender, and how we as historians can incorporate these images into our analyses of gender history. Not surprisingly we have discovered that working with images as historians is complicated – even more complicated than working with more conventional text-based sources – but that it is also fascinating and fun. So, we still want to do it!
Awkward Object of Genocide: Vernacular Art and the Holocaust in and beyond Polish Ethnographic Museums was a initiative carried out at the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, by a group of four scholar-curators. The original aim of the project was to explore public and private Polish ethnographic collections in search of art objects referring to, representing, or commenting on the Holocaust. In our project we propose that this unique genre of the visual document, which has received little attention in studies regarding the Holocaust so far, could offer new insights, as well as forge new arguments, different from those commonly employed in attempts to understand the experience and memory of the Holocaust in Polish provinces.
