Visitors walk through the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The terrain and buildings of the former concentration camps are open to visitors, not only as an historical representation of how they functioned, but as testimony to the atrocities that took place there.
The aim is not just to increase awareness, but to awaken responsibility, so that learning about history has an impact on current thought and behavior.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, in the south of Poland, is difficult to photograph, not only because of its dark history, but also because it has been already photographed so often: the imagery of the former German death camp is almost iconic.
Therefore I decided not to focus so much on the camp itself, but on the tourists taking snap shots of it.
Auschwitz is the biggest tourist attraction in Poland, with over a million visitors each year, but whereas a typical museum pays tribute to beauty or knowledge, this one is all about hatred and intolerance and what it can lead to.
This probably explains why for many years it was difficult to find international sponsors for the costly and complicated maintenance of the site (the wooden barracks in Birkenau were not built for eternity by the Nazi’s).
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