The Erasure of Bodies

There is a voluminous literature on the way photography serves as a form of remembrance of violence and how throughout the twentieth century it has served this purpose. Scholars draw a direct connection between this visual form and its vital role in constructing narratives about the urgent need to remember atrocities.^[1087]

But how do we examine cases when there is no visual representation of atrocity? Anouche Kunth explores the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the attempt to erase any visual evidence through censorship.

But the visual material would soon provide the material evidence that genocide had taken place. Two significant commemorations drew on these photographs to put the case that genocide had been committed against the Armenian population.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide in 1965, the families of the survivors demonstrated around the world to demand justice, after decades of indifference. With the advent of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948, this offered a new opportunity to present a case for genocide. In 1975, on the sixtieth anniversary, a pioneering work was published: Jean-Marie Carzou's An Exemplary Genocide, Armenia 1915, which was accompanied by a booklet of photographs, which were crucial to the remembrance of the event.^[1089] The photographic representation of bodily remains was a powerful form of remembrance when such remains could not be retrieved. The compulsion to never forget through bodily remains continued after the Second World War. Collecting the ashes of the dead became more common, but this was not a new practice. In the context of the genocide against European Jewry this practice was especially poignant.