I remember being in a World History class in Junior High. Our teacher was explaining the Holocaust in broad terms, trying to use our classroom as a way to exemplify the ideologies, policies, and abuse that had occurred. It was then that he pointed out my best friend as the most likely to survive this dark moment in history among the rest of us. His logic was that due to her extremely fair skin, light-colored hair, height, and apparent Aryan features. However, what our teacher did not know was that my friend’s father was Jewish (even though she did not profess the same religion as him) and that one of her great-grandparents had been in fact in a French concentration camp during the European conflict of the Second World War. Why am I telling all this? To demonstrate how the collective memory and trivialization of historical events can draw a boundary between what has been recorded as true versus what we believe to be true.
Of course, how was anyone, our teacher included, supposed to know that this girl’s family, of Israeli and Spanish heritage, had arrived to Mexico as a way to escape the social crisis occurring in a world that seemed to be falling apart? This is merely an example of our everyday life, where a series of impressions and readings portraying their version of what happened in the past dictate our own comprehension of it. But, is it wrong? While there’s a chance for misinterpretation or omission, do new perspectives make way for a retelling or reevaluation of the historical episode and its consequences?
That was precisely the underlying thought process behind James Friedman’s 1981 photography series that incited a personal, emotional, and reactionary response that has continued through to the present. Twelve Nazi Concentration Camps was a project that placed itself between these spaces of human degradation and the memory created by the documents of the past, in order to join perception with reality. By visiting these ruins-turned-tourist-spots and recovering humanity’s dark xenophobic past, which until then had only been seen in black and white, the artist found a way to show the remains of the most referenced manmade catastrophe in recent history through modernity, the gaze of harmless tourist curiosity, and color photography.
This last point is the most arguable and violent formalization of his work. Our fear of transcendence and people’s thirst for tragedy are quite evident. They demand for the aesthetics of National Socialist Germany to be shown in modified formats that sustain and support their own perceptions. Friedman recalls that while presenting his work at New York’s International Center of Photography, one attendee stood up from the crowd to say:
“You can’t photograph Nazi concentration camps in color, on sunny days. Don’t you know that the Holocaust happened in black and white? There weren’t any deep blue skies or puffy white clouds during the Holocaust. What’s wrong with you? How could you take pictures like that?”
Friedman’s photography is available on different levels to facilitate the transition from the collective memory to the individual. This means there is a possibility to always be open for reconstruction. His work creates a visual using these spaces and the perception of the tourists through the pictures they take or self-portraits.
The visitor or survivor’s portrait is mixed into the colors, expressions, and the crowd’s invested interest in order to present questions once the museum’s tour has ended. These questions that cannot be answered by anyone but those who lived through it also counteract the research done after the fact versus the actual facts. The curiosity to know what a Nazi concentration camp smells like is just one example of the morbid thought that an atrocity as such could not be repeated, or that the intolerant elements necessary for it to reoccur are not that common in present-day society.
The comfort created by black and white photographs, as well as the nostalgia and temporal distance they provide, is key for the Holocaust to be urgently filed in the world’s memory in a way that assures distance and, most of all, is only understood as it’s wished to be understood. James Friedman places his work in front of it as an idea that places us once again within a context where nothing is quite what it seems. This shows us in full color, not in the faraway impressions of the past, that the same dangers are still as present as ever within the human condition.
To find out more about Friedman and his work, visit his website and observe the way in which he deals with this and other subjects.
Translated by María Suárez
