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THREE VIEWS (BEST VIEWED FROM THE AIR) series of 3 b/w prints 170 x 120 cm each, 2008
THREE VIEWS (BEST VIEWED FROM THE AIR) series of 3 b/w prints 170 x 120 cm each, 2008
Tatiana Lecomte has spent years photographing the sites of Nazi mass murder. The middle picture of her triptych represents the massively enlarged reverse of a postcard of Mauthausen concentration camp. The downplaying of the genocide is manifested in the form of the reproduction: both the bird’s wing on the logo as well as the statement »best viewed from the air« refer to the aerial war, in particular to the debate around the bombing of concentration camps and the »looking away« of the population. The photo motif, only announced on the back of the card, triggers associations, but the promised panoramic view – also representing the tangibility of the location – is denied.
Lecomte took the two other photographs on the way from the heart of the village to the concentration camp. The view upwards along tree trunks into the branchy canopy of leaves appears dazzled, estranged as in silhouettes. Are these symbols of the Holocaust becoming abstract, of impressions covered by the darkness of repression and »views«, or of the »black-and-white« of the victim-perpetratorassignments?
Underneath each picture is a large, white area. To deal with an unportrayable past, the artist explicitly employs the medium of photography, which is bound to a physically visible reality. The banality of the touristic »exploitation« of Nazism is confronted with the denial of representativeness as a precisely placed blank space.
Stefanie Hoch