Understanding and Improving Public Engagement with Holocaust Photography

理解和提高公众对大屠杀摄影的参与

• 批准号: AH/T012579/1
• 负责人: Maiken Umbach
• 金额: $ 3.04万
• 依托单位: University of Nottingham
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FT012579%2F1
• 关键词: Understanding; Improving; Public; Engagement; Holocaust

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.

该项目考察了游客对互动、多模式展览的参与度，探讨了摄影在调解公众对大屠杀的理解中的作用。它建立在 AHRC 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，该项目探讨了广泛用于纳粹宣传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，从而创造出丰富的视觉资源，但现代观众对此知之甚少。这些见解为全国巡展“作为见证者的眼睛：记录大屠杀”提供了信息，这将使我们能够测试展示这些来源的新方法。该后续资助项目旨在通过利用展览巡演提供的不可预见但宝贵的机会来增强该项目的重大社会和文化影响：观察和评估观众的反应，从而为我们的各种干预措施的有效性提供证据 当代观众。目的是为未来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。该项目是在出于种族动机的仇恨犯罪、反犹太主义不断上升以及公众对大屠杀的了解下降的背景下进行的。这种政治背景意味着收集有关公众对这些问题理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，公众的理解目前因片面依赖肇事者制作的图像而受到损害。虽然这些图像在情感上吸引了观众，但它们也延续了有害的刻板印象。这项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，参观者进入沉浸式混合现实体验，使他们能够探索大屠杀的经典肇事者图像，从而增强他们对图像中的视角、框架和选择的认识。然后，他们遇到了纳粹迫害受害者制作的另类图像，这些图像在展览或网上很少见。互动显示屏邀请参观者记录自己的反思，并将从展览中汲取的经验教训应用于当今世界的暴力、暴行和大规模移民的照片。专门制作的艺术视频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。该项目包括在所有五个举办展览的场馆进行详细的参观者观察、问卷调查和采访：帝国战争博物馆北部（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 美术馆（诺丁汉），以及伦敦一处场地（待定）。我们的项目在将博物馆观众研究的既定定性方法与数字人文方法的创新相结合方面具有开创性。这包括通过混合现实耳机中的凝视、眼睛和运动跟踪进行技术观察，以及以数字方式记录参观者在交互式触摸屏上对照片做出的选择。由此产生的证据将证明我们的干预措施对不同人群的影响，使博物馆能够在未来的展示中充分利用我们的研究。我们测试数字干预措施的有效性还将让博物馆了解新技术在未来吸引游客接触其他困难主题的潜力，并在展示有问题的图像时最大限度地减少有害的副作用。