A Boy’s Own Trauma: Revisiting a Photograph Recorded in a Nazi Concentration Camp First Encountered as a Child

Photographer Roelof Bakker revisits a George Rodger photograph recorded in a Nazi concentration camp, Bakker first encountered as a child growing up in the Netherlands forty years ago. Finally developing this image, which registered in his mind yet remained unprocessed, Bakker actively engages with the photograph as a photographer, investigator and spectator, but also as a human being, integrating thought and feeling into an ethical and responsible process of analysis. Responding to critical texts by Ariella Azoulay, Ulrich Baer, Susie Linfield, Werner Sollors, and others, Bakker looks beyond the photograph as a static object, addressing the other participants in the photographic act, including the photographer’s subject Sieg Maandag, and connecting the photograph to a world outside its frame, towards a future unknown at the time of exposure.