Never has the commemoration of the Holocaust been as important as it is now. The last few remaining survivors and first hand witnesses are getting older and will soon no longer be with us. As Bartov notes, soon, "Everyone, whether scholars or the lay public, gentiles or Jews, the offspring of the victims or the descendants of the killers, will be able to "experience" the event only vicariously, through documents or memoirs, photographs or material remains, films or exhibitions. We will all depend on representations of an event that was almost impossible to grasp even while it was happening" (Bartov 86). For this reason, Holocaust commemoration is becoming increasingly important.

But why have Holocaust museums in the United States? The atrocities of the Holocaust spread throughout Europe and involved the organized killing of millions of people, but never did it touch down on US soil. Posed with the same perplexity when asked about his suggested building of a Holocaust memorial on federal land, Jimmy Carter sighted three reasons. For one, American troops liberated many of the death camps and helped expose the truth of what had been done there and the US became a homeland for many survivors. Secondly, as Americans, we must share the responsibility for not acknowledging the horrible events while they were occurring, and finally, because "we are humane people, concerned with the human rights of all peoples, we feel compelled to study the systematic destruction of the Jews so that we may seek to learn how to prevent such enormities from occurring in the future" (Norden 26).

According to Wollaston, Holocaust museums play four main roles today; as sites of mass tourism, memorials to the dead, vehicles of historical exposition, and living classrooms communicating the "lessons" of the Holocaust (Wollaston 63). The degree to which any of these roles is more pervasive than the other depends on the goals of the specific museum in question. As Wollaston notes, when analyzing a Holocaust museum, it is important to look at who the intended audience is, to whom the staff is formally accountable, and what conditions are attached to its funding. As such, "An independent privately funded institution operates under different constraints from those of a national museum which are reliant, at least in part, on state funding" (Wollaston 64).

This website will explore the visualities produced in the Houston Holocaust museum, a privately funded institution with no formal connection to the state. I am interested in exploring how the different visual forms work together to create an experience and a discourse centered on memorialization, tolerance, and awareness.

A note on images in this project

When I began organizing this project and planning a website around it, I planned on supplementing my descriptive analysis with my own photographs taken from within the exhibit. However on arrival to the museum I learned that photography inside the building was strictly forbidden and was only allowed from the outside. I was told this was due mainly to copyright restrictions, as many of the objects and images have been donated or loaned from elsewhere with the museum holding no legal rights to them.

At that point I decided to turn to the museums printed documentation and website for images and again, I was somewhat disappointed with the limited availability of images. It seems that the museum holds tight control over images for a number of reasons. Aside from the now clear copyright restrictions, the extremely limited availability of images from inside the exhibit seems to be a part of the museums discourse of experience. Clearly, no atrocity, certainly not one on such a grand scale, can be represented by just a few images. This would breed a limited and ignorant perspective at best. Rather, the museum is an experience that must be taken-in in whole. Without the proper contextualization and explanation these images can become nothing more than snuff and I believe that this is a large part of the reason for their tight control of images.

Another possible explanation is that as Wollaston notes, "The Holocaust museums operate in a competitive, overcrowded marketplace" and as such, must be dedicated to their own continuation (Wollaston 64). Perhaps this too explains their tight control over their content to the extent that it makes it more difficult for their "competitors" to borrow ideas from their exhibit.

A note on reflexivity

As you undertake to follow my experience of visualities through the museum, it is important to note who I am and where I come from. I am a first generation Jewish American, born of South African immigrants. Though my great grandfather immigrated to South Africa from Germany, my family has few connections to experiences of the Holocaust since most members were out of Europe by the 1930s. That said, I came to this experience as a Jewish man who was educated in Jewish day schools with a fairly thorough knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust's events. There was nothing shocking about my experience in the Museum. Rather, I was able to focus my attention on the actual visualities used and produced, since neither the information, nor its presentation was new to me. As you follow my experience in the museum, please note my background and education on the subject and understand my analysis as coming from such a context.