Photography, Familiarity, and the Holocaust: A Conversation with Paul Antick

Abstract

It 2005 John Hansard Gallery in Southampton in United Kingdom commissioned Paul Antick to produce fourteen billboards from his art project itourist? Each of billboards featured photographs taken by Antick at various locations in Central and Eastern Europe that are associated with including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Madjanek, Chehnno. Bclzec, and Tcrezin (formerly Theresiensladt:. In December 2006. itourist? billboards were simultaneously exhibited on streets of Southampton and London, and on highway between Prague and Terezin in Czech Republic. In October 2009 seven were shown in a public park in medieval Polish city ofToruri. JANE TYNAN: Can you tell me where itourist? project began? PAUL ANTICK: When I was working at University of Westminster in mid-1990s as a part-time tutor I found a book on someone's desk called In Ike Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941. It was a collection of photographs by Willy Georg, a soldier in German Wchrmacht. Apparently he'd entered ghetto and then photographed what he found there. I was (lipping through this book and an image caught my attention: a young man who looked like a beggar. He was dressed in rags and I don't think he had any shoes on his feet. He was staring directly at camera and what struck me about picture was that it was like looking into a mirror. 1 le reminded me very much of how I used to look, or how I thought 1 used to look, when I was that age I think he was between 17 and 20. Photographs often interest me, but they don't often affect me very much. This one did. It was an uncanny thing, seeing that picture. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I went to Auschwitz for first time with a friend nine years ago. Hut I'd grown up with this thing people called the I Iolocaust; I grew up in a Jewish family in England and it was a word that kept cropping up. As I recall, nobody ever had much to sa about Auschwitz as such, nothing sustained; instead, words like Holocaust, Auschwitz, Germans would be dropped into conversations about other things. So there was an air of familiarity about and I remember sometimes not feeling comfortable with ways in which it was referred to. At time, when I was a teenager, I think it felt to me like some people in my family derived a perverse kind of pleasure in identifying with it. .Now I don't feel like that, or at least 1 don't just feel that. In fact I feel very differently about it. One of things that was obviously extraordinary about Holocaust was that it was dedicated to systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group. What bothered me as a young man was idea that so me people who belonged to that group, people who weren't directly threatened by Holocaust for instance, people in my immediate family appeared to me determined to derive a weird form of kudos from having been indirectly touched by it. This made me quite angry. Now I think I realize that Holocaust actually did touch them in very powerful ways, or at least that being brought up in a country England at a time when expressions of anti-Semitism were very common and in many ways perfectly acceptable, was something that profoundly affected them. Interestingly it seems easier for my family to identify with Holocaust than their own experiences of anti-Semitism in England during 1940s. JT: You mentioned before that there was a darkroom at Auschwitz. Were you interested in how photography was used there? PA: One of things I realized was that photograph} was an important part of administrative culture at Auschwitz. It seems they were compelled to record details of their crimes, although of course they didn't believe that things they were doing were criminal. Many of people in camp were photographed but interestingly hardly any images were created of what we now call Nazi atrocities, and few that do exist weren't, to my knowledge, sanctioned by German administrators. …