A photo album as a medium of memory has a long history. Its precursor was Amicorum Album, widespread in Europe since the sixteenth - a student book containing entries of friends and professors collected as a souvenir, before graduation. In addition to the written text, these albums contained initials, emblems, drawings, pasted engravings - it was a prototype of later 19th-century scrapbooks. With the invention of photography, the album became a common medium for constructing family memory. Family albums have been the subject of extensive reflection in memory studies. As Marian Hirsch wrote, albums are always preemptive commemoration. Composing these private forms of social memory is the result of individual decisions to organize photographic material in the form of the desired narrative. The album's creation process was often associated with silence or censorship of unwanted family history. Overlooked in research official albums made for the institution's purposes functioned differently. Most often created in connection with the jubilee celebrations, these albums also served to commemorate. By building the official narrative, they intend to create the memory of the institution. However, institutions albums are oriented to other content, have a more hierarchical, bureaucratic structure, and seem to be more censored than family albums. After a short episode of, usually, public viewing institution's albums were moved to the archive - a place of remembrance, but also obliteration and repression. In my presentation, I would like to analyze unique official albums - created in the Łódz Ghetto during the Holocaust. These documents were designed in the Graphic Office, specially established unit of the Judenrat, the Jewish administration of the Ghetto. They depict the activities of administrative departments and production facilities and combine constructivist compositions with photographs taken by Jewish photographers active in the Ghetto. They were mainly intended for industrialists visiting the Ghetto. Some albums, however, were created for the head of Judenrat, Chaim Rumkowski, or his subordinates. These documents constituted a form of a luxurious gift allowing to get the protection of the album recipient. The commemorative nature of the medium suggests that these albums were also created intentionally for future recipients. This purpose confirms not only the fact of reproducing these documents for the semi-official Ghetto Archive and references to hypothetical post-war time present in dedications of some albums. Sara Fajtlowicz - the artist who worked on albums in Ghetto, described them as documents for the future, intended to show the excellent functioning of the Ghetto and the competence of its rulers. The creation of this type of materials can, therefore, be treated as a kind of prospective politics of memory pursued by the administration of the Ghetto. Hence, I want to consider the function of these documents as memory carriers. For whom were they archived? Whose vision of the ghetto community were they supposed to present? And what is the status of those, currently forgotten propaganda documents in the context of the extermination of witnesses, the liquidation of the basic memory carrier, which was the ghetto community to which these materials relate?
