In The Camps
Auschwitz, Bełżec, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Bullenhuser Damm, Chełmno, Dachau, Emsland, Belower Wald, Gross Rosen, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Treblinka, Vught, Westerbork... Unspeakable journey to the End of the Night. For more than eight weeks, Erich and Ruth Hartmann undertook a long and rough winter journey to photograph the mute and horrifying remains of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, and places of deportation, throughout Europe. Hartmann had only one decision to follow: black and white photographs only to capture what he sees, immediately when arriving, no matter whether days looked like nights.
Back home, after a Titanic work: 120 rolls of film, a first selection of 300 photographs and, at the end, after another selection of only 74 negatives, Hartmann was ready for publication. The result consisted of the book and exhibition In the Camps, published in 1995 in four languages and exhibited in more than twenty venues in the US and Europe in the years since: "If I have learned any lesson from having been in the remains of the camps,says Hartmann, it is that thinking or living for oneself alone has become an unaffordable luxury. Except perhaps in dreams, life no longer takes place on a solitary plane. It is now irrevocably complex, and we, whoever we are, have become intertwined one with the other, whether we like it or not. Acting on that belief may be a more effective tribute to the memory of the dead than mourning alone or vowing that it shall not happen again. And it may also be the most promising way of doing away with the concentration camps. I am not an optimist, but I believe that if we decide that we must link our lives inextricably - that "me" and "them" must be replaced by "us" - we may manage to make a life in which gas chambers will not be used again anywhere and a future in which children, including my granddaughters, will not know what they are."
In the late 1990s Hartmann began make a definitive selection from fifty years of this personal work, and just a few months before his death he began discussions with a gallery in Austria about developing an exhibition called Where I Was. He died unexpectedly on 4 February 1999, but his wife decided to continue the task of defining and preparing the pictures, and the show opened at Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg on 27 June 2000:"Different from most posthumous exhibits, writes Ruth Hartmann, the beginning, the idea and impetus for this came from the photographer himself in his lifetime and has been realized by others attempting to continue the idea in accordance with his notes.
"Where I was" was not always a specific geographic spot; it was often a frame of mind, as when he found the mannequin factory and saw there a simple and seemingly innocent metaphor for the dehumanizing horrors of our time. (...) These are personal pictures of a busy working photo-journalist, traveling all the time; home briefly in between. Although much of his assigned work was in color, he was never without a camera loaded with black and white film and a small box of extra rolls, which he used to capture what intrigued and fascinated him always: life in progress, people in their environments, enigmatic, unfinished, ambitious. His devotion to photography was lifelong and intense; he saw pictures everywhere. Taking these personal pictures kept his own course steady even as he worked, with equal devotion, on widely varying assignments which often bred new passions and fascinations, as evidenced in his involvement with the intricate beauties of technology. Some of these pictures here come from such assignments. He was There, too."
"I have earned my living as a magazine photographer and photojournalist, says Hartmann, working in many parts of the world for major magazines and businesses, often on subjects of general interest and most often on topics having to do with high technology. Alongside and intertwined with that photographic life has been another, an exploration mainly of aspects of my middle-class (and now late middle-age) self and some of the forces that had an effect on it. I have chosen autobiography as main theme of my personal work for more than one reason. I believe that I can speak most convincingly of what I have known the longest if perhaps not the best, I have derived from seemingly everyday aspects of an outwardly quiet and undramatic life an endless and rich source of challenge, and I am tempted to believe that the results resonate beyond the specific and personal and speak for other lives as well."
On February 4, 1999 Erich Hartmann died unexpectedly from a heart attack in New York.
Read more about this topic: Erich Hartmann (photographer)