IN Nazi-occupied Europe the act of taking a photograph was to risk life itself.

Photography and Resistance: Securing the Evidence in Nazi-Occupied Europe begins with two striking images taken from inside a building in Drohobycz, then part of Poland and today Drohobych in Ukraine. They show the execution of five civilians by a Nazi firing squad.

The first image shows individuals being led to the execution site by armed German soldiers, the second shows a firing squad pointing their weapons at the wall directly below where the photographer was standing. Adam Paszulka, a local resident, took the clandestine pictures from his kitchen window.  

Janina Struk recounts: “Over the four years of occupation, the Nazis regularly used that wall as an execution site, where hundreds, if not thousands of Poles, Jews and Ukrainian civilians were shot. The caption supplied by the Central State Archive in Ukraine, written in the 1970s, stated that the images were taken on 9 August 1944, but that is unlikely as by that time Drohobycz had been liberated by the Soviet Army. It also stated that those being executed were Soviet citizens, whereas in Yad Vashem photo archive in Israel, the caption states the victims were Jews.”

In 1974 a Soviet Ukrainian newspaper found Paszulka living in socialist Poland and asked him why he took the pictures. His answer resolves the questions of time, place and motive. He was, it was reported, guided by a “hatred of fascism and a desire for revenge and freedom.”

Struk brings to her investigation the insights and professional tools of visual analysis and interpretation developed during her long career as a documentary photographer, with much of her work commissioned by trade unions.

She recounts how she was in Drohobycz to trace her father’s past. He was born in the Galician town of Chodorow, then in Poland, now Khodoriv in Ukraine.

Wladyslaw Struk was a Polish airman. When Poland capitulated in September 1939 Polish forces were forced across the country’s southern borders. After escaping interment in Romania, in 1940 he sailed from Constante to Marseilles and was billeted at Camp de Jude at Septfonds, a small village in Tarn-et-Garonne in central France where in the winter of 1939 Spanish anti-fascist refugees fleeing Franco’s victory following the Spanish civil war had also been interned. 

The Spaniards would later be deported by the Vichy government — around 10,000 of them — to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Among them a Catalan Republican photographer called Francisco Boix.

Struk recounts Boix’s role in the smuggling operation at Mauthausen which was responsible for saving more than a thousand incriminating images taken by SS photographers at the camp. In 1946 Boix presented them as evidence at the Nuremberg tribunal which helped secure convictions of leading Nazis.

This is a complicated, personal and difficult book. It is the result of an intensive programme of research and investigation driven by a compelling anti-fascist vision, and a willingness to go where the evidence leads.

Its strength lies in the firm materialist grounding that flows from her work both as a photographer whose practice encompassed both traditional film and digital photography and as an author.  

For example, Struk stresses the importance of knowing something about the photographic process in order to correctly interpret images. “A photograph is not simply a window on the world,” she writes, “Photography is a technical process. A photographer is a mediator and an editor who decides what camera and film to use, what to include and exclude in the composition, and how to include it by choosing the depth-of-field, the shutter speed and focus and deciding then how the scene is lit. 

“This ‘reality’ is further manipulated in film photography in the darkroom, where more decisions are made, for example, whether the image should be cropped and how; which combination of chemicals and photographic paper to choose — choices that can alter the tone or contrast of an image; then whether parts of the image should be lightened or darkened, by ‘dodging’ or ‘burning’.”

This book deals with images created in extremely difficult and dangerous conditions and with a clear political purpose. I ask how she views the ruptures and continuities between the photographic practice she identified as acts of resistance and the practice identified in her acclaimed book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretation of the Evidence (2004).

“Photographing the Holocaust was about who took the pictures, why they took them and where and how the images were used during the war and then since — and for what purposes and in which contexts,” says Struk, “the thesis of my earlier book is essentially a plea that pictures should be treated as historical documents — as a text in themselves — and not as illustrations as images so often are. Photography and Resistance takes that idea as a base and looks at how images taken by all protagonists were used as a form of resistance, which suggests that the meaning of an image is determined largely by the context in which it is found.”

Discussing the context of contemporary wars, in Europe and in the Middle East, I ask if there are any conclusions we can draw from the way images of these conflicts are presently created, reproduced and circulated? And whether there is an oppositional practice that we can identify?

“The main difference between photography in Nazi-occupied Europe and current wars is technology,” Struk answers. 
 
“Those who took photographs in Nazi-occupied Poland had only celluloid film which required a workforce of darkroom technicians to process the films, a means to hide it and an army of couriers who were prepared to risk their lives to smuggle it across heavily guarded borders to the Allied countries.”

Her reply goes to the heart of the present political situation and to the new reality of image production in the wars of the 21st century.

She continues: “In the age of digital technology images taken by civilians and professionals alike in wars in Europe and the Middle East can be transmitted around the world and displayed on social media in seconds. And although this is a huge shift, the reasons for their dissemination are sometimes similar.

“The Polish underground resistance, for example, smuggled images to the Allied countries in an attempt to push governments to action.

“In Gaza, Palestinian journalists, also victims, are working at great personal risk — more than a hundred journalists have been killed by the Israelis in the territory since 7 October — because it is their jobs, but we also assume to push the world to take action. In this sense they too are using images as a form of resistance.”

Photography and Resistance, Securing the Evidence in Nazi-Occupied Europe by Janina Struk is published by Routledge.

Janina Struk will be speaking about her book on February 27 at Ognisko Polskie, 55 Princes Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PL at 7pm. To book a place contact Ognisko Polskie: (020) 7589-4670 or go to events.ogniskopolskie.org.uk.