Auschwitz, 2015

One thought on “Auschwitz, 2015”

David Raved says:

July 6, 2018 at 6:56 am

I love enamel, simple material, humble, lacks sophistication, has gradually disappeared in this age of “use and dispose”. The photo of the enamel coated utensils’ pile has no beauty, not even simplicity. The significance of the photo is given by the observer. The photographer can, at best, capture his own story in the photograph, but the observer has his personal prism that dismantles and builds a reaction that the photographer just perceived and ignited.
An incidental photograph, wanting effects, lacking shading, exposed, practical and missing context. There is no information, no context and even though it succeeds, with a knock on an
Aperture, to present well the banality of evil.
At the center of the photo, quite randomly, a bowl, covered internally with red enamel, dotted with white circles, that have long lost its enamel glass shine, horrifying in its owner’s choice to carry on the long journey he begun. A child like bowl. How has it reached the pile of empty dishes in a place where clean dishes present murderous starvation? What went through the head of the mother who hastily deals with packing the forced travel bag permitted to take with, which makes her choose this small bowl? Perhaps the small boy that tacked her dress rims asked to take his breakfast porridge bowl, an intuitive small preserved piece of existence, prior to the journey’s vicissitudes.
Most evil expressions are not personal, its horror’s source is in its incidentally, in the additions that we load on them, which kills each and every intuitive endorphin within us. Specifically, the image that flattens the reality, beaten, worn out dishes, defines and represents the methodical obsessiveness in this refined evil.
A photographed image has been for many years the ultimate expression of transferring information visually. Memorializing the frozen moment produced a sort of tablet, relieving in the observer insights to compete the picture in merging memories, personal load, feelings,
prejudices, knowledge and imagination. An internal process of neurologic and not a computerized “processing a picture”. “The death of a militiaman” by Robert Capa, he, he is the Spanish Civil War. The picture “Jewish Boy surrenders in Warsaw” is the European Jewish Holocaust. But In the passive photo in front of us there is nothing from all the above. Lacking instruments in “freezing the moment”, with no connotation, there is only a collective visual memory that converts a pile of old utensils in a type of conscious “zoom out” to a railway platform, wire fences, security guarding towers, lines of crowded wooden structures, gas chambers and incinerators, their story cast on the photograph.
The photo does not show “memorialization of a moment”, there is a freeze of a situation, a particle of a second, where the shutter of the camera’s aperture exposes the photo’s object to the CCD component that stores it in the CPU and presents a frame on LCD. This particle of time is actually a significant and concentrated time capsule. From there it’s just our chain reaction, almost Pavlovic, a sort of thought and sentiment reaction catalyst, that defines a different reality for us, even if it is conscious and took place many years ago.
The “internal burning engine” of our accumulated knowledge, on the world of context and images built within, layer on layer, as probably on our “tribal” connectivity with the brutal and inhuman chapter this pile represents for us. Even if the picture was taken in Papua – sunny Guinea, our context will place us in dark and grey Eastern Europe. A “jumbled stack of pots and bowls”, will never be a “jumbled stack of pots and bowls” but an uncompromising emotional sign.
I like enamel. A natural material that enriches the materials it touches.
Enamel is a material created by melting glass powder on top a platform layer then baking (usually at a temperature of 750° to 800° centigrade). Enamel can be melted on most types of metal. The glass powder melts and when it hardens it becomes a glassy material, smooth and rigid, resistant to fire and chemicals. The enamel is likely to crack or break in case its basic layer is under pressure or becomes crooked. Due to the enamel’s resistance it is ideal for objects that are meant to be resistant to heat and dampness.
Enamel is the love of my youth. Following my father who was entranced by the material and incorporated it in his jewelry craft works, I also started to be captured by the material’s physical uniqueness and the “Sinderella” like process that forms during its creation. As a growing teenager I was fascinated by the vague colorful powder which turns into a glazed surface of colorful abundancy, that creates pictures on copper surfaces which I would prepare. The craft of “painting” with the glass powders must be meticulous. One must control the widespread powder scattered everywhere, using stenciled cutout paper to create artificial designed boundaries. Something in this precision, with the required concentration, “Teutonic” perfectionism of defining the borders of the meeting lines, the control of wanting to create new enamel life, is the opposite of the way those unwanted bowls were randomly piled up.
In proximity to the said period (with no connection to it) I was exposed for the first time to the “Holocaust”, following the abduction of Adolf Eichmann to Israel and his trial, which fascinated and exposed me as a child to the atrocities beyond understanding, which description is mainly verbal. It is hard to imagine today exposure without visual, based mainly on “Facing the Glass Booth” of Haim Goury in the “LaMerhav” daily newspaper, the Prosecutor Mr. Gideon Hauser’s heavy “Teutonic” accent on the radio, or the breakdown and collapse of K. Tzetnik during his testimony.
It has been many years since I have dealt with enamel. However, the Holocaust and Nazism still occupy me to date. The melancholic photograph of the stacked enamel utensils touches me there. There is something horrifying in the actual gathering and meticulous guarding of peeling enamel bowls, lacking uniqueness, that reminds you that at the end not only enamel is a thin glass wrap. 

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