Deathly Still: Pictures of Concentration Camps FROM THE PUBLISHER
Fifty years have now passed since the end of the World War II and the first shocked reports of the concentration camps. In the immediate aftermath of that ghastly discovery, writers, artists and philosophers asked how one could still write after the Holocaust: the brute facts of human cruelty seemed then to exceed the powers of any possible representation. But today, a half century and three generations later, our culture urgently needs to preserve the reality of the Holocaust. In 1987 Dirk Reinartz set out on his sad itinerary: Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Treblinka. The list goes on. Seven years later he has compiled this series of 200 black-and-white photographs of the 24 ruins of the death camps.
FROM THE CRITICS
BookList - Gretchen Garner
In 279 chilly, gray photographs taken at 25 different Nazi concentration camps, Reinartz successfully portrays the very purpose--death--of these horrific places. In the photographs, no figure intrudes on the stark emptiness and brutal orderliness of the camps' architecture. The photographs are carefully composed, and their tonal range deliberately compressed, so that there is no brightness in them, only shades of gray. Nor is there any shred of sentiment, only emptiness and silence. In his text, Krockow contrasts the truth of the pictures and the superficial, "amusement park" ambience that greets actual visitors to the camps today. He meditates as well on the failings of the human mind that allowed the power to kill to go unchecked. Disturbing photographs, thoughtful text.
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