In the Winter 2015 issue of Slavic Review Ewa Stanʻczyk used Jacek Frąsʻ’s artwork to raise questions about child soldiers in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. According to Stanczyk, Frąsʻ revealed Warsaw in ruins, “a powerful reminder of the material and human losses caused by the uprising.” In a letter to the editor, Peter Pastor pointed out that two of the images, including the plane in the apartment building and the two dead women on the ground—were not taken in Warsaw, or elsewhere in Poland. The photo of the plane and the dead women were taken in Budapest. Instead of an exchange of letters, I proposed a larger discussion about the overlapping and differing use of photographs by artists and historians. I asked Pastor, Stańczyk, Jacek Frąsʻ, David Shneer, and Oga Shevchenko to reflect on the “afterlife of photographs” by considering the following questions. Do artists and historians part company on the question of photographs as evidence as opposed to photographs as art? Do artists and historians have a different kind of responsibility to their subject matter and their audiences? Here are their responses.
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