Ghosts of Inhumanity

The Michener Museum presents Michael Kenna’s haunting photographs of Nazi concentration camps.

By: Susan Van Dongen

"image"
"Theresienstadt,


1989"


   People of a certain age might remember their fathers and grandfathers dipping a small horsehair brush into a cup of shaving soap, then spreading the lather across their faces like frosting on a cake. It’s a more elegant procedure than squirting shaving cream on your hands.
   It was a photograph of a pile of discarded shaving brushes that caught photographer Michael Kenna’s eye as a student. He was at Banbury School of Art in England when he noticed such an image in a fellow student’s developing tray, only to learn that this was a mountain of brushes belonging to long-deceased victims of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp.
   Many years later, Mr. Kenna would photograph the same shaving brushes, amassed in a special room for personal effects, alongside a mountain of eyeglasses, and another of wooden legs and other prosthetics, and yet another for shoes.
   Images of these personal effects are just some of the 80 elegant,
haunting black-and-white photographs by the British-born Mr. Kenna in the exhibit
Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After at the James A.
Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pa.

"image"
"Auschwitz,


1993"


   The show, co-curated by the Michener Museum’s Brian Petersen, follows a progression, starting with shots of the out buildings, block houses, exterior walls and railroad tracks that lead to the camps. Mr. Kenna has photographed the numerous gates prisoners passed through — mostly once — all of which have the saying "arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) on the ironwork.
   Around the edges of the camps are scenes of natural beauty.
There’s a blue sky and fluffy clouds above Treblinka, stately trees at Auschwitz,
a tranquil pond at Birkenau — made especially opaque from the human ashes
that lie beneath its surface. Nature has tried to come back, but it is rumored
that in some of the abandoned camps, wildflowers will not grow and birds will
not nest or even fly over.
   "If you didn’t know what you were seeing you might think it
was just a landscape," says the Michener’s Elisabeth Flynn. "Michael Kenna was
so struck by what he saw and by the idea that if you didn’t know what (the facilities)
were intended for, you might think these were abandoned factories or something.
It’s that kind of ordinariness combined with the truth of what they really were."

"image"
"Birkenau,


1989"


   "Many of the concentration camps I visited were eerie, particularly those in Poland and the former East Bloc countries," says Mr. Kenna, speaking from his home in Portland, Ore. "Those camps were left derelict and empty in the ’80s. I found it impossible not to sense a lingering presence of the heinous crimes that had been committed in these places. At times it was depressing to realize that our human spirit is capable of such extreme evil. Accepting that we are all capable of these extremes of hate and love, depending on our personal circumstances and choices, is very humbling."
   The images in the exhibit are treated with great sensitivity.
Mr. Kenna’s use of angular perspectives, composition and atmospheric lighting
reveal an aspect of contemplation and meditation.

"image"
"Dachau,


1994"


   He takes the viewer inside the camps and we see what the prisoners
would have witnessed — the barbed wire, watchtowers and smokestacks, foundations,
hallways and heavy equipment. This might be the abandoned industrial detritus
of Bethlehem Steel. But then we see the examination tables, neat rows of surgical
instruments and meat hooks — meat hooks? — all of which give a more
macabre feel. The barracks, lavatories, benches and bowls give more clues to the
human presence.
   "That’s what’s so striking, there are these very ordinary objects or images but they carry the weight of history behind them," Ms. Flynn says. "With Kenna’s work, so much is left to the imagination which makes them moving, but also somewhat sinister. You’re just free to imagine. The photos are also very beautiful, which is jarring as well."
   "There were many objects and places that were disturbing," Mr.
Kenna says. "The physical remains of the victims were particularly potent, so
were the labs where ‘medical’ experiments were carried out, so clinical and yet
so gruesome. Then there were the gas chambers and ovens…"

"image"
"Birkenau,


1993"


   One photograph of a gas chamber shows a room lined with tiled walls and vents in the ceiling. It could be a regular shower facility if you weren’t reminded this was Dachau. Another gas chamber at Lublin-Majdane has a bizarre unforeseen element, perhaps from lens flare or the development process. In the shadows to the left of the picture is what looks like a waft of vapor or a ghost.
   The ovens are portrayed like one-eyed steel monsters, mouths open, screaming or wailing. Other details play tricks on the mind. A photo from Auschwitz shows a pile of empty Zyklon B gas cans, but the words on the label look like they say "gift gas."
   There’s a bizarre logic and attention to detail in the camps,"
Ms. Flynn says. "This combination of brutality with the precision and reason behind
it is so chilling. You can’t write it off as a one-time thing. Clearly (the killing)
was pre-meditated, very carefully planned."

"image"
"Skull


and bone fragments from Stutthof, Poland, 2000"


   Finally, Mr. Kenna has captured the piles of personal effects the imprisoned and murdered left behind — eyeglasses and shoes, suitcases with names written on the outside and shaving brushes. There’s a room full of braces, corsets and prosthetic limbs — two of which look as though they’re nestling each other. The last images in the show are of a skull and bone fragments from the Stutthof prison camp and a memorial to the dead at Mauthausen.
   Now we see faces and are reminded that there was humanity in these places, along with the unspeakable inhumanity.
   Born in England in 1953, Mr. Kenna has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1981. During a stay in France in 1986, he traveled to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, which was a catalyst for his decision to develop a project about the Holocaust. Between 1988 and 2000, Mr. Kenna visited more than two dozen camps in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic as well as France, Italy, Holland, Latvia and other oppressed countries.
   For Mr. Kenna — who is not Jewish and whose family did
not experience the abuse of the Nazi camps — this was a very personal project
which only his family and friends knew about until the late 1990s. Then, in 2000,
he decided to donate 300 original prints and their corresponding negatives to
the French government. The exhibit and its catalog, Impossible to Forget: The
Nazi Camps Fifty Years After (Nazraeli Press, $65), were organized by Patrimoine
Photographie, Paris, with the support of the French Ministry of Culture.
   "I think my work on this subject basically started as a personal attempt to try to understand and process something that is really incomprehensible," Mr. Kenna says.
   "Also, he had a sense that, in a generation or two, there won’t be any living survivors," Ms. Flynn says. "So, as a photographer, he felt one way for him to help was to document this for the generations born after the war. He felt an obligation to create these images as a way for future generations to pass on the knowledge of what happened at these places."
Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After, photography by Michael
Kenna, is on view at Wachovia Gallery of the James A. Michener Art Museum, 138
S. Pine St., Doylestown, Pa., through April 10. Special admission fee of $4 in
addition to general admission: $6.50, $6 seniors, $4 students. Gallery hours:
Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. noon-5 p.m. For information
and events in tandem with the exhibition, call (215) 340-9800. On the Web: www.michenerartmuseum.org.
Michael Kenna on the Web: www.michaelkenna.net
Events in tandem with the exhibit include: Through the Eyes of an Empathizer, slide show and lecture with sculptor and art educator Marlene E. Miller, Feb. 2, 1 p.m.; Deborah Cooper, coordinator of International Services at the Southeastern Chapter of the American Red Cross, lectures on the continuing efforts to find and reunite families torn apart by the Holocaust; Film Series, three Sundays at 3 p.m.: Feb. 13, Au Revoir les Enfants; March 6, Night and Fog; April 10, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. All programs are at the Ann and Herman Silverman Pavilion of the Michener Museum. Free with paid admission and special exhibition fee. Registration required. For information, call (215) 340-9800.