Understanding and Improving Public Engagement with Holocaust Photography

该项目考察了游客参与互动，多模式展览，探讨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，现代观众在很大程度上不知道。这些见解为一个全国巡回展览“作为见证的眼睛：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。这个后续资助项目旨在通过利用展览巡回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：观察和评估受众的反应，从而证明我们在接触当代受众方面的各种干预措施的有效性。其目的是为未来的策展，教学和政策实践提供信息，围绕在大屠杀纪念和学习中使用摄影。该项目是在种族仇恨犯罪、反犹太主义和公众对大屠杀的认识下降的背景下进行的。这一政治背景意味着收集有关公众对这些问题的理解的信息既及时又紧迫。我们的假设是，公众的理解是目前受到片面的依赖，在想象今天的大屠杀制造的图像。虽然这些图像在情感上吸引观众，但它们也使有害的陈规定型观念永久化。在我们的展览中，参观者进入一个沉浸式的混合现实体验，探索大屠杀的经典犯罪者形象，提高他们对图像中的视角、框架和选择的认识。然后，他们会遇到纳粹迫害受害者制作的替代图像，这些图像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，并将从展览中学到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。一个专门制作的艺术视频装置为我们提供了一个机会，探索艺术干预在支持历史和技术展示方面的有效性。该项目包括详细的游客观察，问卷调查和采访，在所有五个场地举办展览：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），和一个伦敦场地tbc。我们的项目是开创性的结合博物馆观众研究的定性方法与数字人文方法的创新。这包括通过我们的混合现实头戴式设备进行凝视、眼球和运动跟踪的技术观察，以及在交互式触摸屏上数字记录参观者对照片的选择。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示中最佳地利用我们的研究。我们对数字干预措施有效性的测试也将告知博物馆新技术在未来吸引游客参与其他困难主题的潜力，并在展示有问题的图像时尽量减少有害的副作用。

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.