BIO
Kylie Thomas

Kylie Thomas is an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice, University of the Free State, South Africa. In September 2019, she began a two-year Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. She is currently writing about women who have used photography as a form of resistance and about photography, violence and memory during and after apartheid. She is the author of Impossible Mourning: HIV/AIDS and Visuality after apartheid (Bucknell University Press and Wits University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference (Routledge, 2015). Many of her published articles can be accessed online: ufs.academia.edu/kyliethomas

PROJECT
Photography as Resistance: the case of Emmy Andriesse
2018

Emmy Andriesse (1914-1953) was a Jewish Dutch photographer who was forced to go into hiding in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In 1944, after she obtained forged identification documents, she began photographing again, and at great risk, she documented life in Amsterdam during the occupation and in the immediate aftermath of the war. Her work forms part of the group of photographers who worked with the Dutch resistance movement and that came to be named De Ondergedoken Camera (The Underground Camera). As a result of the Peter Palmquist award, I was able to spend time at the Leiden University library special collections where I worked with Andriesse’s books of contact sheets. I focused in particular on the images she took in Amsterdam during the Hunger Winter between 1944-1945, when more than 20,000 people starved to death. The album containing the Hunger Winter contact proofs begins with images that portray the hardship and suffering of people who remained in the Netherlands during the Nazi Occupation and ends with photographs of the return of those who survived the camps. Among these are a photograph of Ernestine van Witsen-Weinberg who is shown at the gates of Amsterdam central station on her return from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of June 1945, and of two young men returning from forced labour camps. Both images are also portraits of those who watch the survivors returning and who do not move to assist them, and in this way Andriesse raises the question of the complicity of those who collaborated with the Nazis. Of the 107,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands only around 5000 returned. The research I conducted at the library at Leiden University forms part of the book I am working on about women photographers who used photography as a form of resistance during and after the Second World War.