To say that a picture speaks a thousand words might no longer ring true. As images proliferate at an unprecedented rate online, they risk losing their meaning, especially as AI poses a growing threat to the truth of what we see. We might ask why images of the relentless killing and devastation in Gaza, there for all to see, have not yet halted the slaughter of Palestinians.
Into this situation comes Juergen Teller, “enfant terrible” of 1990s fashion photography, who has produced a coffee-table book about the Nazis’ concentration and extermination camp in Auschwitz. This goes some way beyond his usual remit. Teller is known for his knack for making pretty things look ugly, as a shorthand for “authenticity”, associated with the grunge aesthetic and so-called “heroin chic”, which made him the most in-demand fashion photographer of his era.
The book, titled simply Auschwitz Birkenau, is published by the biggest German art book publisher, Steidl, with a cover designed by Peter Saville, the man behind so much revered Joy Division and Factory Records artwork
What is actually in the book? Photography-wise, it is fairly bland, documenting the site as it stands today, preserved as a monument against forgetfulness as the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The selection could have been taken from an anonymous Flickr account. Like an overbearing tourist, Teller photographs every single thing he sees in Oświęcim, the town where the camp is located: from the electronic parking plates and tacky hot baguette parlours to the details of the gas chambers.
There’s no hierarchy. But the haste is visible. All the pictures – more than 800 in total – were taken on an iPhone, and with stupefying simplicity: close shot of the barracks, details, then a panorama; a close shot of empty Zyklon B cans, then a wider shot, a panorama; and again and again in the same way. He uses the same approach for a pseudo-poignant “perspective through the barbed wire” photograph, and wistful closeups of melting snow-covered grass.
The photographs are interspersed with memories of former prisoners, collected by Christoph Heubner, the executive vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee, who invited Teller to carry out this project, and who is also behind the Gerhard Richter Birkenau pavilion, an exhibition space which opened in Oświęcim last year.
Teller’s book caught my attention precisely because of Huebner’s involvement, as it made me wonder: why would you invite a celebrity artist – a German one at that – to document Auschwitz? The problem with Teller’s book is not that he’s famous, nor that his most famous work is in fashion – it’s that these photographs contribute nothing to a deeper understanding of Auschwitz. The pictures are totally unremarkable, and get nowhere near what new photography of Auschwitz ought to strive for: to refocus our attention on something previously unnoticed.
Perhaps you could argue that this is a deliberate strategy, and a more thoughtful one – for Teller to suspend his own personal style and render himself invisible. Except that he isn’t invisible. In one of the former barracks, block 27, there’s a special interactive installation devoted to various nations’ experience of extermination, including a Yad Vashem-inspired “Book of Names”: a library of books containing the name of every single documented Auschwitz victim (it is ever-expanding). And what does he do with it? He photographs all the pages with the surname “Teller” on it. Of course, thousands of German-born Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. But to single out your own name is not a gesture of solidarity – it’s narcissism.
As perpetrators, the Germans strictly controlled any photographic evidence of the extermination, ensuring no documentation escaped the walls of the death camps. Indeed, there is a vital and ongoing debate about whether photography is an appropriate way to address the Holocaust at all, given that the original photographic record does not exist.
Earlier this year, the Auschwitz Memorial established a digital replica of the camp, prompted by growing interest from film-makers (at present, only documentaries are permitted to be filmed there). The only known pictures of the extermination camps are the four Sonderkommando photographs, secretly taken by Jewish prisoners and smuggled out, which have become the subject of the Gerhard Richter paintings on display at the Oświęcim pavilion.
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On the wall of the pavilion there is a quote from Richter: “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human.” This drove the ire of the Jewish-German artist Leon Kahane, who in his current DIALOG DIALOG DIALOG exhibition counters Richter’s take with four blank sheets, mirroring Richter’s format, repeating the German master’s quote in three languages. Kahane supplements this with photographs of a contemporary neo-Nazi demonstration, pointing our attention towards the real and ongoing problem of antisemitism in Germany.
What if the most human thing is in fact to refrain from forming an image? Kahane’s empty canvases point to a broader crisis around how to represent the Holocaust. Richter’s approach introduces unnecessary pathos, making the evil universally human, rather than an act committed by a specific nation nurtured in a specific culture. But at least it arguably opens an interesting philosophical argument.
No such thing can be said about Teller’s Auschwitz Birkenau book. His view of the camp is banal, or occasionally sentimental (pictures of souvenir kitsch included). In a moment where the very legacy of the Holocaust is being politicised, it is detached and generalising, blurring notions of responsibility, while seeming worryingly like a vanity project.
Visiting Auschwitz has become too easy a way for Germans and other nations alike to show how far they’ve come; that they’re now free of antisemitism. With Teller’s book in hand, maybe even that won’t feel necessary to some. As artists and as societies, we bear a responsibility to history. If Auschwitz is allowed to become an increasingly empty symbol, and we lose our ability to capture the horror of the Holocaust, how are we going to ensure that future generations understand that it really happened?
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Agata Pyzik is a critic and author of Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West. She lives in Warsaw
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