Raymond Depardon: Auschwitz-Birkenau
From the website of Memorialdelashoah.org (https://www.memorialdelashoah.org/en/auschwitz-birkenau-vu-par-raymond-depardon.html):
“In 1979, for two weeks, photographer and film director Raymond Depardon took a series of black-and-white photographs on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These images, a commission from the magazine Paris Match, were published just after their production in several international magazines.
It is an Auschwitz-Birkenau under the snow that Raymond Depardon discovers. The immaculate whiteness of the landscape contrasts with the darkness of the buildings and fences of the camp and the vegetation that emerges there and there. An impression of solitude and geometric immensity emerges, punctuated by elements reminiscent of humans: a prisoner’s dress, a grass, a tree. Not a soul that lives. Covered in powdered white, the camp, and what we know about it, is indeed there, and Raymond Depardon grasps its most significant elements…”
The exhibition in Paris is about to close but I was there today. Three rooms, the images as described above, shocking in its documented simplicity, I watched, got tears in my eyes, thought of the growing anti-semitism of today. Of Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog”, of Claude Lanzmann’s film.
And – not related to this exhibition – how good it was that Depardon and his wife Claudine Nougaret was awarded at DocsBarcelona for their life long achievement in cinema and photography:
