Identifying and interpreting prewar and wartime Jewish photographs in Polish digital collections

Prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews are historical documents and unique records. A worldwide interest in photographs presenting Jewish life in Poland on the eve of the Holocaust and during the war has been sustained by the traveling exhibit And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews, which first opened in Poland in 1996. In recent years, some Polish archives and research institutes have begun digitizing their photography collections, including prewar and wartime photographs of Polish Jews and their communities. In this article, the author focuses on two main questions: the archiving and retrieval of digitized photographs and the identification and subject analysis of the digitized collections, including participatory or social "tagging.".