Janicka photographed the skies over concentration camps. That area, that void, that space or, as she called it, the air, implies at least several things in this work. It is a space where the ash from crematorium ovens once swirled. It also refers to hate that can so easily dominate and asphyxiate public space. In these pictures shot on photographic negative, the material aspect was also important – a physical trace.
Analysing the form of this work reveals an open composition, restricted only by a black frame bearing the name of the negative’s manufacturer, the German firm Agfa. This minor detail is also significant: the producer of photosensitive material was part of the IG Farben concern which made donations to the Nazi Party and the SS, and hired thousands of workers inside occupied countries. Simultaneously, many iconic images of the Holocaust were captured on film it had manufactured.
Instead of a concrete image, the artist chose to create a conceptual work – a white square as a symbol of something impossible to capture, describe or convey. A similarly limited horizon of the imagination was suggested in 1943 by Jankiel Wiernik, a prisoner of Treblinka, whom Janicka quoted in an interview:
