In the autobiographical preface to this book, Françoise Meltzer recounts a formative—and shocking—childhood experience. It occurred in the early 1950s, when Meltzer lived in Frankfurt in a mostly American apartment complex with her American diplomat father and her French mother, Jeanne Dumilieu, a former member of the French Resistance and an amateur photographer. Six-year-old Françoise and her friends went trick-or-treating on Halloween, but one of the building's few German residents took umbrage at “spoiled, costumed little American children excitedly demanding candy” and responded by throwing a pail of sewage (or possibly excrement) at them, abruptly ending their holiday (2). This disproportionate reaction and other similar outbursts of German anger in the immediate postwar era bespeak the extent of the defeated nation's psychological trauma. This inner wreckage corresponded to the destroyed facades, submerged bridges, and mountains of debris that became the “scenery” of Meltzer's childhood (5). A cache of Jeanne Dumilieu's previously unpublished photographs of these destroyed German cityscapes forms the focal point of Dark Lens, a genre-defying book that is at once a family photo album, an autobiographical meditation, a cultural history of ruins, and a rigorous work of photographic criticism.

The central questions that animate Dark Lens are twofold: “How does one represent and depict war ruins and destruction? How does one's relation to the events change the perspective?” (7). Inspired by her own memories and her mother's photographs, Meltzer wonders if images can induce us to identify with an enemy's suffering. Dark Lens investigates this still-topical concern in four main chapters. Chapter 1 offers an abbreviated history of the aesthetics of beholding ruins. It also presents tonally varied written reports from postwar Germany describing the destruction. Chapter 2 addresses painting. The third chapter shifts to photography more generally, and the fourth chapter brings us at last to rich readings of Dumilieu's photographs.

The choice of cultural materials that Meltzer analyzes in the first two chapters are eclectic, sometimes producing what she acknowledges are “odd juxtapositions” (7). Chapter 1, for instance, compares Hannah Arendt's description of her 1949–1950 visit to Germany for the magazine Commentary with J. Frank Dobie's January 1947 article for National Geographic about his own experience of the ruins. Although the pairing of a German-Jewish political philosopher with a folklorist and journalist best known for his depictions of rural Texas initially seems arbitrary, Meltzer justifies the combination because Arendt and Dobie shared similar assumptions and observations. Arendt wrote that Germans were “feverishly busy” and wondered if their “greedy craving for something to do every moment of the day” bespoke an inability to feel (20). Dobie likewise remarked on a sense of activity that seemed to repress the “calamitous surroundings” (22). These texts, as well as others by Stig Dagerman, Gertrude Stein, and Margaret Bourke-White, help Meltzer establish an analytically useful taxonomy of written responses to ruins, which range from the political and philosophical to the folksy and sarcastic. The eclecticism of the case studies continues into the second chapter, “Ruination in Painting,” which compares paintings by two artists whose connections are again not immediately self-evident: Karl Hofer, labeled by the Nazis a degenerate artist and a family friend of Meltzer's parents, who painted images of ruins in the 1930s, and the contemporary neo-expressionist artist Anselm Kiefer, whose provocative art aggressively engages with the legacies of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Chapters 3 and 4 segue to a dense theoretical discussion about how photographs (mis)communicate meaning and eventually to Dumilieu's photographs. Drawing on canonical theoretical texts by Roland Barthes, Ariella Azoulay, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, John Berger, Susan Sontag, and others, Meltzer cautions against reducing photographs to transparent illustrations of history, emphasizing instead that photographic signification depends on captions. By way of example, Meltzer corrects the standard reading of a famous photograph from a May 7, 1945, Life magazine photo essay titled “Atrocities.” Life's caption to the image of a boy walking along a corpse-lined road near Bergen-Belsen described him as a German youth who “strolls” by the bodies and averts his gaze, making him a symbol of German indifference. By drawing on recent research, which shows that the boy was actually a Dutch Jewish survivor of the camp, Meltzer flips the narrative—the boy's “indifference” reads as something much darker. The broader theoretical point, derived from Louis Althusser, is that “How we see is always shaped by ideology … which is what determines our status as subject: ‘Individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects’” (105). It is ethically incumbent on the beholders of images of ruins and atrocity to historicize and reflect on their positionality. By themselves, Jeanne Dumilieu's images are not especially revelatory. Aesthetically, they resemble any number of postwar German ruin photographs. Paradoxically, what sets them apart is not inherent to the images at all. Rather, it is Meltzer's position—her close relationship to Dumilieu—that afford her intimate knowledge of the context of production. These insights allow her to tease out the unseen mentalities that these vernacular photographs disclose rather than just the visible rubble they document.

Although there are many more reasons to applaud Dark Lens than to criticize it, two lacunae nevertheless merit note. First, one could reasonably expect the book to offer larger, better-quality reproductions of the photographs central to its argument, not least because Meltzer's subtle analyses often hinge on tiny details in her mother's snapshots, which, as the work of an amateur, were sometimes oddly composed, grainy, or out of focus. Second, the absence of any sustained engagement with Trümmerfilme (rubble films), a signature representation of postwar German ruins, is conspicuous. Film is clearly within the book's scope, as Dark Lens references both Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Edgar Reitz's epic Heimat films. Yet nowhere do readers encounter the short-lived postwar genre that used actual ruins as backdrops for narratives that put viewers in the position of beholders of German ruins. Yet nowhere do readers encounter Trümmerfilme (Rubble films), the short-lived postwar genre epitomized by Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers Among Us, 1946) that used actual ruins as backdrops for narratives that put viewers in the position of beholders of Germany's destruction. These quibbles aside, Françoise Meltzer's latest book is a welcome addition to scholarship that, in the last decade, has finally begun to take photography seriously as a medium that can productively complicate historical understandings of traumatic history.