Unframed, unmatted, and untitled, the photographs are poster-size (6 feet by 4 feet) and aim to elicit posterish responses. The pictures are moving and powerful. How could they not be? These are solemn and noble images that are surpassingly aware of their solemnity and nobility. They betray a moral insecurity masquerading as aesthetic chasteness. They don’t trust the viewer to arrive at individual interpretations or feelings. “This is Auschwitz,’’ they say, “shrink with horror, view with despair, congratulate yourself on being serious and humane enough to do so.’’
The problem is such injunctions carry an implicit coda: And now it’s OK to move on to the next gallery and get on with your life. How much more challenging and thought-provoking to see these terrible sites in color, with people, and situated in the 21st century. For the enduring terribleness of Auschwitz is that it wasn’t a discrete universe, monochrome and remote under a sunless sky. Rather, it was a place on the same planet we all live on. So long as Auschwitz is treated as a special, separate case - instead of what it was, perhaps the most horrifying instance on a continuum of human barbarism that touches us all - it somehow absolves us all.
The dozen pictures in Jessica M. Kaufman’s “Panopticon’’ are related to Tell’s in content and form. They show the grounds of Nazi concentration camps and are black and white, untitled, and large (most are about 3 feet by 4 feet). They are, however, wholly different in approach.
“I sought to dispose of most recognizable clues to the specific places and surviving environments,’’ Kaufman writes, “in order to recast them as sites for new meaning.’’ She also used a technical process that softens the images.
