Understanding and Improving Public Engagement with Holocaust Photography

该项目通过互动式、多模式的展览考察参观者的参与度，探讨摄影在促进公众对大屠杀的理解方面的作用。它建立在人权委员会资助的项目“摄影作为国家社会主义的政治实践”（2018-21）的成功基础上，该项目探讨了在纳粹宣传中广泛使用的摄影如何扭曲了我们今天对大屠杀受害者的看法。该项目还揭示了受纳粹政权迫害的人们如何利用摄影来记录反叙事，从而创造了丰富的视觉资源，然而，这在很大程度上是现代观众所不知道的。这些见解为“作为证人的眼睛：记录大屠杀”全国巡回展览提供了信息，这将使我们能够测试展示这些资料的新方法。这个后续资助项目旨在通过利用展览巡回所提供的不可预见的宝贵机会，来增强项目的重大社会和文化影响：观察和评估观众的反应，从而产生证据，证明我们的各种干预措施在吸引当代观众方面的有效性。其目的是为今后在大屠杀纪念和学习中使用摄影的策展、教学和政策实践提供信息。该项目是在种族仇恨犯罪、反犹太主义上升以及公众对大屠杀认识下降的背景下开展的。这种政治背景意味着收集有关公众对这些问题的了解的信息既及时又紧迫。我们的假设是，在想象今天的大屠杀时，公众的理解目前受到了片面依赖肇事者制造的图像的影响。虽然这些图像在情感上吸引了观众，但它们也使有害的刻板印象永久化。这种后续资金使我们能够确定不同的策展干预措施是否可以帮助观众更批判性地观看大屠杀照片。在我们的展览中，参观者进入一种沉浸式的混合现实体验，使他们能够探索大屠杀的经典犯罪者形象，提高他们对图像中视角，框架和选择的认识。然后，他们会看到纳粹迫害受害者制作的另类照片，这些照片很少在展览或网上看到。互动显示屏邀请参观者记录自己的反思，并将从展览中吸取的经验教训应用于当今世界暴力、暴行和大规模移民的照片中。一个专门制作的艺术录像装置为我们提供了探索艺术干预在支持历史和技术展示方面的有效性的机会。该项目包括详细的参观者观察，问卷调查和访谈，在所有五个举办展览的场地：帝国战争博物馆北（曼彻斯特）；布拉德福德和平博物馆；国家纪念植物园（斯塔福德郡）；Djanogly艺术画廊（诺丁汉）和伦敦的一个场馆等。我们的项目在将博物馆观众研究的定性方法与数字人文学科方法的创新相结合方面具有开创性。这包括在我们的混合现实耳机中通过凝视、眼睛和运动跟踪进行技术观察，以及在交互式触摸屏上以数字方式记录游客对照片的选择。由此产生的证据将展示我们的干预对不同人口统计的影响，使博物馆能够在未来的展览中充分利用我们的研究。我们对数字干预效果的测试也将告知博物馆，未来新技术在吸引游客参与其他困难主题方面的潜力，并在展示有问题的图像时将有害的副作用降至最低。

This project examines visitor engagement with an interactive, multimodal exhibition that explores the role of photography in mediating the public understanding of the Holocaust. It builds on the success of the AHRC funded project 'Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism' (2018-21), which explored how photography, which was widely used in Nazi propaganda, has distorted the ways we perceive victims of the Holocaust today. The project also unearthed how people persecuted by the Nazi regime deployed photography to record counter-narratives, thus creating a rich visual resource, which is, however, largely unknown to modern audiences. These insights have informed a national touring exhibition 'The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust', which will allow us to test new methods for exhibiting these sources.This Follow-on Funding project is designed to enhance the significant social and cultural impacts of the project by capitalising on the unforeseen yet invaluable opportunity provided by the exhibition's tour: to observe and evaluate audience responses, thus generating evidence of the effectiveness of our various interventions in reaching contemporary audiences. The aim is to inform future curatorial, pedagogical and policy practices around the use of photography in Holocaust memorialisation and learning. The project takes place against a backdrop of rising racially-motivated hate crimes, Anti-Semitism, and a decline in public knowledge about the Holocaust. This political context means that gathering information regarding public understanding of these issues is both timely and urgent. Our hypothesis is that public understanding is currently compromised by a one-sided reliance on perpetrator-made images when imagining the Holocaust today. While these images engage audiences emotionally, they also perpetuate harmful stereotypes. This follow-on funding allows us to ascertain whether different curatorial interventions can help audiences to view photographs of the Holocaust more critically.In our exhibition, visitors enter an immersive Mixed Reality experience which allows them to explore a classical perpetrator image of the Holocaust, sharpening their awareness of the perspective, framing and selection at work in the image. They then encounter alternative images produced by victims of Nazi persecution, which are very rarely seen in exhibitions or online. Interactive display screens invite visitors to record their own reflections and to apply lessons learnt from the exhibition to photographs of violence, atrocities and mass migration in the world today. A purpose-made artistic video installation provides the opportunity for us to explore the effectiveness of artistic interventions in supporting historical and technological displays. This project comprises detailed visitor observation, questionnaires and interviews in all five venues hosting the exhibition: the Imperial War Museum North (Manchester); the Bradford Peace Museum; the National Memorial Arboretum (Staffordshire); the Djanogly Art Gallery (Nottingham), and one London venue tbc. Our project is ground-breaking in combining established qualitative methods of museum audience research with innovations from digital humanities approaches. This includes technological observation through gaze, eye and movement tracking in our Mixed Reality headsets, and digitally recording choices visitors make about photographs on interactive touch screens.The resulting evidence will demonstrate the effects of our interventions on different demographics, empowering museums to make optimal use of our research for future displays. Our testing the effectiveness of digital interventions will also inform museums about the potential of new technologies to engage visitors with other difficult subjects in the future, and to minimise harmful side-effects when displaying problematic images.