Bujak's makes competent use of the photographic rhetorics. On the black and white, high-contrast rotogravures saturated with soft black, the remains of the camp begin to look almost like ancient ruins. The artist also follows the changes affecting the landscape, the progressing entropic process and the infiltration of the old camp grounds by plants. On one hand, he aestheticises the landscape of an extinction site, and on the other, conjures a feeling of terror. We see motifs of flames, smoke, human hair, barbed wire – a canonical set of symbols of Auschwitz subjected to a visual transformation. This luridness is not, however, delivered directly. Bujak makes interesting use of images from the camp's years of activity by photographing them as elements of the museum display. It is a canny way of coping with circumstances in which even the most expressive contemporary photographs are unable to give justice to the events that took place here during the war.
Bujak's Oświęcim… shows the concentration camp as a museum and commemorative site visited by crowds of, among others, youth. It is an International Monument to the Victims of Fascism, a place of commemorative events and ceremonies, which has become a ritualised form of remembering, inscribed, together with the subsequent anniversaries of the camp's liberation, in the official calendar of both Polish People's Republic and UNESCO. Photographs taken by Bujak, as well as his followers, in Auschwitz are a testimony to the broader political and cultural process leading to the transformation of the site, a place charged with a very particular history, into a universal and monumental symbol – also visual – of war and extermination.
photographs: Adam Bujak
text: Adolf Gawalewicz
graphic design: Witold Chomicz
publisher: Sport i Turystyka, Warsaw
year of publication: 1972 or 1973
volume: 208 pages
format: 30 x 24 cm
cover: linen hardcover with dust jacket
print run: 15250