Pointedly, Marina Amaral’s work inspires a need to learn about the Holocaust in new audiences through alternative forms of communication.
Inspired by the positive reception of Czesława Kwoka’s colorized registration photo, Amaral committed herself to colorize more photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners and initiated an official creative collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: 'Faces of Auschwitz'. The goal of the project is to tell stories of individual Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners who were photographed during the registration process. Each week, Marina colorizes one of the original black-and-white prisoners’ photos ensuring historical accuracy of the colors she uses.
The 'Faces of Auschwitz' project engages with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s collection of 38,916 registration photographs that were taken between February 1941 and January 1945 in the laboratory of Erkennungsdienst in Auschwitz I. The preserved photos, 31,969 of men and 6,947 of women, constitute only a fraction of a vast Nazi photo archive destroyed during the camp evacuation in January 1945.
While we do not know the total number of registration photographs taken during the operation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we do know that only prisoners who survived
Inspired by the positive reception of Czesława Kwoka’s colorized registration photo, Amaral committed herself to colorize more photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners and initiated an official creative collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum: “Faces of Auschwitz”. The goal of the project is to tell stories of individual Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners who were photographed during the registration process. Each week, Marina colorizes one of the original black and white prisoners’ photos ensuring historical accuracy of the colors she uses.
The “Faces of Auschwitz” project engages with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s collection of 38,916 registration photographs that were taken between February 1941 and January 1945 in the laboratory of Erkennungsdienst in Auschwitz I. The preserved photos, 31,969 of men and 6,947 of women, constitute only a fraction of a vast Nazi photo archive destroyed during the camp evacuation in January 1945.