The Holocaust

"We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive."
"Here, there are no fathers, no brothers. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."

-Night, Elie Wiesel.

During the Holocaust, death became so frequent it went without recognition. Torn away from a civilized society, torn away from their homes and their families, torn away from their lives, they either learned to adjust to the harsh conditions or they perished. They needed to remain numb to all of the death surrounding them, and their instincts to cry or revolt in response to the terror quickly changed. At this point, the people had no country, no identity, no sense of humanity left within them. They were treated inhumanely, and with no power to resist against such treatement, they became inhuman.

This photo is about emptiness. Silence. Absence. The absence of faith, the absence of God, the absence of humanity, the absence of identity. Those who perished had no names, and like those people, this horror itself has no name. Words are too limited to articulate how I feel about this, but I've done my best to represent it visually. Flowers and knives are just objects. I do include a human element--the hair, the hands--but in the end, death is annonymous. You have no personal connection to the objects or the people. You don't know exactly what, or who, you're looking at. It is meaningless, annonymous death that is accepted without question, without concern, because you have no choice but to see it that way.