Photography: the “human madness” of Auschwitz-Birkenau seen by Depardon: News

“There you say to yourself is human madness”: this is how French photographer Raymond Depardon, 82, described to AFP his discovery in helicopter, in 1979, of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the object of an unprecedented exhibition at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.

“You see things that you do not see on the ground. Consequently, there you say to yourself it is human madness (…) We can not compare this to nothing. For example, I had never seen that”, adds the one who was one of the very first Western professional photographers to photograph the site of more than 40 km2 located near the small town of Oswiecim (Poland), entered the same year in the World Heritage of UNESCO.

More than a million people, including 90% Jewish faith, were exterminated during the photography: “human madness” auschwitz-birkenau seen Second World War.

“For me this camp was the whole war. For example, ” added this “post-war child” who says he grew up on his parents’ farm near Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône), where “two German prisoners” worked which made him a “toboggan” and whom he saw as “normal men”, his only memory of the war.

Baraquements, station platform, gallows, miradors, barbed wire, gas, crematorium ovens … The black. white photographs that he made in Auschwitz-Birkenau were reproduced in very large format on the walls of two memorial rooms.

Dozens of contact boards of this report commissioned by Paris-Match are also exhibited alongside magazines. extracts from international newspapers where they were published at the time.

Among them: a famous view of the snowy railroad that transported convoys to deportees to the death camps.

– “Energy of confinement” –

“One of photography: “human madness” auschwitz-birkenau seen the first convoys is the day of my birth on July 6, 1942 (…) It is a bit as if it had been written that I had to do these photos”. underlines the photographer, who describes a work carried out with an “energy of confinement” that he still does not explain today.

“The views that I made are incredible because first I asked for time. I flew around a little, it was very impressive because I saw lots of small farms, chickens in the snow, very modest small farms,” ​​says the photographer who flew over the site aboard a Soviet helicopter from Warsaw.

On the ground. there was, “snow, cold, birch” emaciated, but what struck him the most, he says, “is the perfect organization” of this complex in perfect condition of conservation.

He struggles to describe this concentrational universe with words. puts his hand photography: “human madness” auschwitz-birkenau seen on a wall where his clichés in close-up of toxic gas crystals Zyklon B (which the Nazis used in the gas chambers) or the door of a open-knit oven, speak of themselves.

He also evokes with emotion the film directed by the Red Army soldiers who entered Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27. 1945, “all young people who are 18, 20 years old and who films (Sergeï) Eisenstein (pioneer of Soviet cinema, editor’s note)”, undoubtedly the “most moving film” he has ever seen.

“Often death it feels, there in this case this is not the case. The second thing that comes with death is undoubtedly light. there we see the apocalypse, the end,” adds the photographer, known for his countless reports in Africa but also for his documentaries on the peasant world, the life of a police station or psychiatric emergencies.

“I know that there are photography: “human madness” auschwitz-birkenau seen Polish resistance fighters who made a camera (at the time. note) to keep track because the first thing I imagine, and I think it is in the minds of all these people that we have sacrificed, it is that it is good to keep a trace”, he adds, “happy” that his photos found “their place” in the Shoah Memorial.

Posted on June 26 at 9:26 p.m., AFP

Share