The end of the Second World War marked a turning point in the history of the visual culture of atrocity. This is not just because of the unprecedented number of images of death and suffering that Nazi terror left in its wake, but also because it was only in 1945 that the power of images to authenticate, bear witness to, and “bring home” the reality of civilian suffering became fully recognised. Over the decades, scholars from different disciplines have considered the historiographic, commemorative, and educational value of Nazi-era atrocity images and sought to better understand their symbolic and evidential power. This work has primarily focused on the Western social, cultural, and political context, with relatively little attention paid to cross-cultural variability in the visual representations of atrocities and the associated differences in the production, curation, exhibition, and consumption of violent images. It was only in the early 2000s, as the tragic fate of 1.5 million Soviet Jews started to attract greater interest from Holocaust historians, that attention turned to the visual memory of Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union and to the Soviet regime's efforts to document, publicize, and often politicize and instrumentalize images of suffering.

David Shneer's first book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes (2011) was a seminal piece of work in this emerging area of research. It not only introduced English-speaking audiences to previously unknown images and photographers, but it also scrutinized the intricate and contradictory ways in which Soviet media and propaganda machinery deployed these images as they sought to commit to memory the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Shneer's last book also examines the relationship between photography, politics, and memory in the Soviet Union but does so from a different angle, and it takes the reader in a different yet equally fascinating direction. As the title Grief suggests, the book follows the life story of a single image: Dmitri Baltermants' iconic photograph taken in the aftermath of the massacre in Kerch in Crimea in January 1942. This is one of a series of photographs showing grief-stricken Russian women searching for their loved ones among the lifeless bodies strewn on the muddy ground in the bleak Crimean landscape. The book tells the story about how and why this image came into being, how it became constituted as a powerful proof and symbol of Nazi atrocities against Soviet citizens, and how its visibility and meaning shifted over the years, with changing political times.

Although the title of the book refers to this image as a Holocaust photograph, Shneer is clear from the outset that “it is highly likely that no one pictured in the photograph is Jewish.” What makes it a Holocaust photograph, Shneer argues, is that the image has been transformed over the years “into a shorthand for the larger story of the genocide of peaceful Soviet citizens, most of them Jews, all of them enemies of Nazi Germany during World War II” (4). Whether this is a sufficient reason to treat this image as a “Holocaust liberation photograph” (4) is a matter for debate. The important thing, however, is that during his visit to Kerch, Baltermants—who was himself Jewish—photographed both Jewish and non-Jewish victims, and it so happened that an image of grieving non-Jewish women (rather than of dead Jewish women) later became his most famous work, and an iconic Soviet war photograph. As Shneer's analysis shows, this is because, unlike most atrocity images of that era, it was not just a gruesome closeup of a corpse; the wide-angle shot captured the scale of the atrocity and the emotional drama of its aftermath. The symbolic figure of the distraught woman evoked the recognizable “pathos formula” (52) common in visual representations of war. Also, the photograph could cater to different audiences and address different ideological concerns: it could be read as an image either of a massacre of civilians or of the aftermath of a heroic battle. Perhaps most importantly, the image is visually very striking. As we learn in the book, the black menacing clouds hanging over the grisly scene were added by Baltermants after the war, to provide a sense of perspective and make the photograph more arresting. Thus, an image that constituted proof of Nazi depravity in 1942 was transformed many years later into a piece of art, to be gazed at and admired for its aesthetic and visual properties.

Perhaps the most significant and thought-provoking aspect of Shneer's meticulously researched and compelling book is the account of the transformation of Baltermants' photograph from a World War II historical document to a global artistic commodity. Shneer explores how in the 1980s, during the glasnost era, Baltermants became the “Soviet Robert Capa” (143) and how signed prints of his work became collectors' items, auctioned on the fine photography market in the United States. Two decades later, whole collections of Soviet-era photographs were being bought and sold on the international market by art collectors among Russian billionaires or by shadowy investment funds. In 2021, Baltermants' archive was sold at an internet auction for $1.3 million to a mysterious conglomerate, and it remains in an undisclosed location. In many ways, the story of Grief is the story of Soviet and Russian society's (and arguably the world's) changing values, ideologies, and ways of seeing.

David Shneer wrote Grief while engaged in a long battle with brain cancer. Tragically, he lost that battle in November 2020, just a few weeks after the book was published. As well as being a prominent scholar of Russian Jewish history and a much-loved professor at the University of Colorado, David was an accomplished singer, a committed activist for a variety of progressive causes, a loyal friend, and a loving husband and father. His untimely death deprived the scholarly community of a talented and highly regarded colleague, whose books taught us so much about the importance of the visual in our understanding of the past.