“Lest We Forget”: Bringing Atrocity Home Through Large Photomurals

ABSTRACT The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition opened on Memorial Day, May 30, 1945, just over a month after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen and Dachau concentration camps where many of the photos were shot. Twenty-five enlarged atrocity photomurals, ranging up to 12 feet high and 19 feet wide, were hung in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch building’s mechanical annex. Over the course of three and a half weeks, 80,413 people visited the exhibition in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibition then traveled the US in the summer of 1945, including stops in Boston, Detroit, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition used the photomural medium to share the atrocities that Americans read about and saw small photographs of in newspapers in a new way. While photomurals were widespread in the decades leading up to the exhibition, photomurals of atrocity photographs were uncommon. Did the scale of the photomurals affect the experience of viewing atrocity images? What did American politicians think of the exhibition and how it could impact public opinion? How did visitors react to the exhibition throughout the US? Were there similar exhibitions abroad? My article deals with these questions by piecing together sources ranging from newspaper articles to exhibition photographs and a government speaker draft. Starting with the exhibition’s visual landscape and an analysis of the photomurals’ scale, this article then turns to the American government and civilian experience, before closing with an analysis of the London exhibition and publication. By sharing large-scale atrocity photomurals in a collective setting, the ‘Lest We Forget’ exhibition evoked new, emotional reactions from visitors.