In January 1945, Nazis ordered prisoners Wilhelm Brasse and Bronisław Jureczek to burn the remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau photo archive.
In an attempt to preserve photographic evidence of the camp registration system, Wilhelm and Bronisław retrieved undestroyed photographs from the furnace and boarded the lab door to prevent unauthorized access after the evacuation of the camp. The two saved 38,916 photographs, all of which constitute the current archival collection of the Museum.
“Ideally, I would like to colorize all the 38,916 images, but I need to be realistic,” Amaral said. “This is a task that would take me years to complete. However, if I manage to tell at least 200-500 stories, I will feel satisfied!”
As she is preparing for the launch of her debut book The Color of Time: A New History of the World, 1850-1960 this August, Amaral emphasizes that "color has the power to bring life back to the most important moments." When asked specifically about her Holocaust project, she affirms that “color makes us understand that these [photographed] people were human beings, not mere statistics.”
So far, her work has received more praise than criticism. Since the visual aspect of 'Faces of Auschwitz' lends itself well to online sharing, the affordances of social media have become central to online proliferation of Amaral’s work. She has taken to Twitter to release her work and, consequently, educate her followers about the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Rarely, Amaral tweets about her frustration with people who “don’t understand her work” and view it as transgressive or inconsiderate: “I only express my dissatisfaction when I receive criticism that is based on sheer prejudice. What I am trying to achieve is not a simple task: I dedicate hours, days, and weeks of labor to colorize a single photo.
There is an intense research involved in each one of my projects and people underestimate the physical and emotional burden involved. (…) I am not trying to replace the original photos, but rather offer a new perspective on well-known documents. Probably, if the technology was accessible to camp officials at the time these pictures were taken, many of them would have been taken in color. I want to show the events how they really happened, the way the photographers saw them.”
Salomon Honig