AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
AS SEEN BY RAYMOND DEPARDON
Memorial de la Shoah
In 1979, over the course of two weeks, photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon created a series of black-and-white photographs at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial site. These images, commissioned by the magazine Paris Match, were published shortly after they were taken in several international magazines. Until November you can see them in an exhibition at Memorial de la Shoah in Paris.
What Raymond Depardon discovered was a snow-covered Auschwitz-Birkenau. The pristine whiteness of the landscape contrasts starkly with the darkness of the former camp’s buildings and fences, and the scattered vegetation emerging here and there. A feeling of solitude and geometric vastness emerges, punctuated by elements evoking human presence:
a prisoner’s dress, a blade of grass, a tree. Not a soul in sight. Covered in powdered white, the camp—and what we know of it—is still there, and Raymond Depardon captured its most significant elements.
Twenty years later, he returned with Claudine Nougaret and their two sons for a personal visit, a step they considered essential.
On the occasion of the 80th commemoration of the end of World War II and the Holocaust, Raymond Depardon agreed to publish the photographic series depicting the site, which has been
a museum since 1947. These photographs had never before been the subject of an exhibition or a dedicated publication.
The photographs will be preserved at the Shoah Memorial and made available for consultation through the online catalog of the photo archive.
Excerpt from the interview with Raymond Depardon, published for the exhibition in the art book Auschwitz-Birkenau as Seen by Raymond Depardon:
Paris Match sent you in the winter of 1979 to the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp for a photo report. How do you approach such a place as a documentarian, filmmaker, and photographer? Did you research before going, or had you seen images by other photographers?
Raymond Depardon: No, I didn’t really do any research. In 1979, I had just moved from the Gamma agency to Magnum, which was a big moment for me. I had just returned from several difficult reporting assignments and was still feeling the loss of Gilles Caron, who had disappeared ten years earlier in Cambodia, captured by the Khmer Rouge. Like many other photographers, we were all deeply marked by Vietnam.
As often happens in journalism—almost like a cliché—they asked me: “Raymond, could you do a report at Auschwitz for Paris Match?” So I said yes, and one morning I found myself there. It was one of the greatest shocks of my life. I asked myself: “What is this? A movie set?
A horror film?”
I then decided to explore everything. Each day, I uncovered more horror. I tried to take it in gradually, because I had to keep working—otherwise I would’ve been overwhelmed, sat down, and done nothing.
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