Martin Blume

Auschwitz heute

Language: German, English, Polish
160 pages, hardcover
67 illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-95565-077-3
Publication date: 2015
29.90 €

Zum 70. Jahrestag der Befreiung von Auschwitz

Auschwitz – site and symbol of the German National Socialist extermination policy. All around the world, the name of the southern Polish town has become synonymous with the Holocaust and genocide. It stands for the murder of millions of Jews, Poles, Sinti and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and others who the Nazis considered unfit for the “Volksgemeinschaft.”
When we hear the words “Auschwitz-Birkenau,” our minds are inevitably flooded with an array of images: the entrance building in Birkenau, the snow-covered tracks and the sign above the main gate that reads “Arbeit macht frei.” These are signs and symbols that are terrifyingly known to us, images that are circulated in the media and are thus associated with a sense of familiarity among the general public – a state of mind which is often coupled with the presumption to always already know everything about Auschwitz.
This illustrated book wants to encourage people to look again and to look closer. It is not our intention to simply add our voices to those loudly crying “Never again!”, and we have no interest in pointing fingers at social behaviorisms that are to be expected. According to photographer Martin Blume, “vagueness offers up a space for one's own projection, sidestepping dismissal and denial.”

Photographs by Martin Blume and essays by Stéphanie Benzaquen, Tomasz Kobylański and Christoph Kreutzmüller 



Martin Blume

Martin Blume (1956-2015), Lehre als Chemigraph, Zweiter Bildungsweg, Diplom in Psychologie, seit 1986 intensive Auseinandersetzung mit dem Medium Photographie. Agfa-Ehrenpreis der Large Format Photo-Foundation (1991), 1994 Berufung in die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh), Gründung der „Academia Palatina“ zur Förderung der klassischen Schwarz-Weiß-Photographie, Initiierung der „Classic Photography“, vorwiegend projektbezogenes Schaffen.

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