12 Nazi Concentration Camps

The photographs in my archive tell the tale of a life. They are autobiographical. They are personal. They are full of emotion. Some are humorous. Others, such as those from 12 Nazi Concentration Camps, are confrontational, disturbing, unpredictable and about our collective memory (yours and mine). In the photographs I made in 1981 and 1983 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Fort Breendonck, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Natzweiler-Struthof, Theresienstadt and Treblinka, I constructed conceptual and technical counterpoints to the historical and contemporary photographs of the camps made by a number of photographers, including Margaret Bourke-White, George Rodger and Erich Hartmann. My pictures were created in color with a cumbersome 8” x 10” field camera; the historical and contemporary photographs by other photographers were made with smaller, more portable cameras using black and white film.

The expectation on the part of many viewers is that contemporary photographs of Nazi concentration camps should be in black and white and without people or reference to the contemporary world. My color photographs include self-portraits, tourists and survivors, and have inspired visceral responses in many viewers. My photographs of the camps exist in stark contrast to the historical black and white photographic record of Holocaust images that are the basis for most viewers’ knowledge and understanding of the Nazi era.

Some of the photographs from 12 Nazi Concentration Camps are available as signed, archival pigment prints for purchase. Signed, vintage, dye transfer prints from 12 Nazi Concentration Camps are available for purchase and as an exhibition of 30 photographs. Contact jim@jamesfriedmanphotographer.com with inquiries about purchases, gallery representation, printed-on-paper and online publication, Holocaust research and gallery and museum exhibition initiatives

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