Alien/Foreign Environment 2

As I wasn't overly please with my original idea in the Ribble Valley and planned a trip to Poland with my mum instead. Where we would visit the salt mines, Auschwitz and just generally Poland. Although the problem was we were quite short on time when we were there so didn't get to see all that much of Poland, and the salt mines disappointed me a little. Despite that I feel I got some interesting shots from my trip. I used my canon digital camera, with a zoom lens, and a canon 15mm fisheye lens. I could only go once here, so it was critical that I was happy with my results and the images of Auschwitz specifically, as they were going to be presented as finals in a book. In the end I was very pleased with the overall trip and impressed with the outcome. Although I cant really show you my finished book on here, I was very happy with it. I chose to present the images with a poem I found that I felt suited the images well. The poem is as follows:

Holocaust
by Sudeep Pagedar
- Selected Poems

How do you
explain that term
to a ten-
year old boy
who, one day,
hears it mentioned
by some relatives?

And even if
you do manage
to make him
understand what it
actually does mean,
do you also
tell him that
because he is

A GERMAN JEW,

perhaps, some day,
he might be
included in it...?

Or should he
just not be
told, so that
he remains calm
and doesn't lose
sleep over it?

But what is sleep,
in front of death?
Perhaps Death is greater,
perhaps the two are the same;
we do not know yet
but we'll know, by the end of the day;
the Chambers are yet some hours away.

"To die, to sleep...to sleep, perchance to dream..."

How did Shakespeare realise that?
Did he know some Jew
who was persecuted too?
Perhaps he was wrong,
maybe he was right...
Anyway, I suspect we'll find out
by tonight.


It was difficult to arrange my images and the poetry together so I spent a good few hours arranging them and breaking the poem up. I managed to make the images portray a story as the prisoners would have experienced it, from arrival in carts, to working in the yards, sleeping arrangements and the gas chambers. I broke the poem up into very small snippits so that there were enough per page, and still made sense and flowed well. This book is my final images and as I have never done anything like this before, so it was my first attempt I was very pleased with the results.

All of the following images are from Auschwitz and Birkenau, the first is of the wagons, this particular one would have carried people in to Auschwitz and was where they would get off to do the 'death march' into the camp.


These next images are of the buildings that were surrounding the gas chambers in Birkenau that have corroded.


One if the watch towers at Birkenau.

The bunkers at Birkenau.


One of the buildings in Auschwitz.


The 'beds' in Birkenau
The beds and washrooms in Auschwitz

Numbers and signs on some of the buildings at Auschwitz. The sleeping rooms and 'hospital' where the Nazi's would practice ridiculous things on the Jews, like the twins, to try and create the perfect Nazi.









The belongings that were left behind from all of the prisoners at Auschwitz. Shoes, pans, prosthetic legs and crutches etc. In these images I tried to recreate the work of Edward Burtnysky only with something a little more sinister.