Abstract
The paper focuses on the strategies of selection of the documentary photographs used by historians and theorists of art. By presenting the double exemple of the treatement of the illegal documentary photographs that "survived" the official elimination - typical for the Nazi camps of extermination during the Second World War on one hand, and for the socialist censorship of the period of Normalisation in Slovakia on the other hand - the article shows how the three strategies of selection were applied: exclusion, delimitation, affirmation.
The selection of photographs is approached as a strategy od representation that is based on our way of recalling the past: as shown by G. Didi-Huberman, it can be finally defined as an act of fetishism, revealing in this current practice of history of art several totalitarian aspects.