What am I researching?

My PhD project examines personal photo albums and loose photographs as a unique lens into the untold stories of Jewish life in Norway. I approach these photographs as ego-documents: self-produced records in which Jewish Norwegians reflected on their own lives, families, and communities. Instead of retelling a narrative of victimhood and passivity, my project asks how Jewish Norwegians lived with and through photography before, during, and after the Holocaust.

How am I researching it?

The project rests on extensive empirical groundwork in Norwegian and international archives. Its core is a largely unstudied corpus of around 250 photo albums compiled by Jewish Norwegians, containing tens of thousands of photographs, plus a roughly equal number of loose photographs. These are complemented by almost 300 rarely re-used oral history interviews with survivors and their families by six different institutions, institutional records, and auxiliary ego-documents such as memoirs, letters, and diaries. Because the Norwegian Jewish community is small, these sources together offer an extraordinarily broad view.

All material has been digitized, cataloged, and manually annotated in a structured research database, which cross-references connections between albums, photographs, interviews, and archival records. On this foundation, I combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify overarching genres, themes, motifs, patterns, and absences across time and space, while qualitative close readings of selected albums examine sequencing, framing, repetition, and omissions as elements of a life’s narrative. This analysis is supported by custom-built digital tools, including Python-based pipelines and AI-assisted image recognition, applied in accordance with GDPR.

Why does it matter?

Personal photographs capture lived experiences and self-expressions that are rarely recorded elsewhere. By tracing the forms and meanings of Norwegian-Jewish personal photography, the project contributes to a richer and more nuanced history of Jewish life in Norway beyond the Holocaust. This is the first systematic study of Norwegian-Jewish personal photography.

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