Berlin Holocaist Memorial...a photo essay (lots of pictures)

[JohnF1956]

The Berlin Holocaust Memorial is not easy to photograph. I was there recently on a dark and dreary, rainy day, which did not help.

Link here.

But I think these caught the spirit of the place.

Technical data: Olympus EPL1, with 50 f2 Digital Zuiko macro lens via adapter, 45-200 Panasonic m4/3 lens, VF2 finder. ISO 200. All photos shot in RAW, conversion to JPG and some processing in Lightroom 3.

 

[The_Traveler]

This may be too subtle for me.

I don't get any kind of context or information from this series - and I can't tell what it's about, why the series tells me more than any one image.
There are a couple I like but, since they aren't numbered, it's hard to refer to them or discuss them.

(and please, considering the subject, edit the title to correct the spelling.)

Lew

 

[kathyt]

I like the last shot because the composition is really appealing, but since I have never seen this and have no idea what I am looking at, it looks like a bunch of concrete to me.

 

[SCraig]

I have to agree with the others. These appear to just be photographs of vertical or wooden slabs of some sort. They don't say anything more than that to me, and without some sort of description that's all anyone would be able to interpret from them.

 

[Trever1t]

Agree. As geometric art it's interesting but I would never know without an explanation what I was looking at.

 

[alexecho]

For me 'Photo essay' would imply a story - a photo from the distance maybe, to give a feel of what you're looking at, before the close ups? Info, in text, or an artistic view of an information board? But some nice shots, as abstract art, just too many similar, I feel.

 

[JohnF1956]

Hmmm...

I supplied the link to the wikipedia article about the memorial.

Okay. Putting it in perspective:

The memorial starts off on a flat plane, with blocks set into the sidewalk surrounding the memorial. The center of the memorial is around 2 meters deeper than the rest of the memorial, a slow sinking of the surrounding area. The blocks or stelae start to appear slowly, rising then up to the middle of the memorial to be over well over anyone's head, one enters the memorial and sink into the center, with the stelae of concrete rising above you. These stelae symbolize groups of people being arrested, deported, brought into the concentration camps: at first you do not see them (the ones at ground level) but at the center of the memorial the enormity of the stelae, representing the deaths of millions, is unavoidable and cannot be overseen.

The point of the essay was the abstractness of it for us today. To quote the original:

According to Eisenman's project text, the stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.

The goal of the essay was to bring the abstract back to the real, of showing only details of the whole, to focus on details rather than capturing the entirety.

Like I said: it's a difficult place to photograph, since it can't be captured well. It is my failure that it is clear that I haven't made that obvious.

Thanks for your comments, all.

 

[SCraig]

It's not so much a failure on your part as it is an abstraction on the part of the designers. Places like that, as you said, are difficult to photograph so that the photographs will stand on their own without an essay to describe their purpose. No matter what you photograph or how you portray it, you still wind up with nothing more than photographs of an abstraction that cannot stand on their own.

I've been to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing and the USS Arizona at PEarl Harbor. Both of those memorials are similar in some respects because without some narrative the full meaning of the site cannot be understood or appreciated.