IN IMAGES
Auschwitz was the biggest extermination centre in the history of humanity.
Yet our collective image of this universal symbol of the Holocaust has been created from just a handful of surviving photographs taken at the camp.
These portraits and scenes—largely taken by the perpetrators themselves, the SS—are incontrovertible evidence of the crimes committed at Auschwitz. However, they also present a major challenge to viewers, who are unconsciously seeing history from the perspective of the photographers, in other words, through a Nazi lens.
Seeing Auschwitz invites us to critically reflect on the images, exploring what they really tell us, not just about a specific place and time but also about the perpetrators, the people photographed and even ourselves as viewers.
