Industrial Culture

Our first artist in "Gallery Of The Month" is Poland based, Agnieszka Akula. She is 29 years old photographer with ingrowing portfolio every week. One of her proposals is serie "Wires" (Polish "Druty") made in Oswiencim, Nazi Concentration Camp (network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp), Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp), Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp and 45 satellite camps).

Why wires and why Oswiecim, Nazi Concentration Camp? What message would you like to deliver, what emotions put on these photos?

Weekend with friends at Krakow, impulse - visit Auschwitz. I don't wonder why I'm making one choice or another usually. It is matter of intuition, this inner voice which shall lead you the best of possible ways, if you would let yourself to listen to it. I'm convinced that it happened this time again. Nazi Concentration Camp, alike its substance component - wires - are symbol of separation, isolation. Mental enslavement, which according to principle thought-word-action, turned into physical enslavement. If man forget that is connected with everything what is alive, stops to respect life at all. And emotions... well, I hope that my photos will inspire you to journey, both to Oswiecim and inside yourselves, which would help you to find answer what is surrounding us all the time.

 
The exact number of victims at Auschwitz is impossible to fix with certainty. Since the Nazis destroyed a number of records, immediate efforts to count the dead depended on the testimony of witnesses and the defendants on trial at Nuremberg. While under interrogation Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943, said that Adolf Eichmann told him that two and a half million Jews had been killed in gas chambers and about half a million had died "naturally". Later he wrote "I regard two and a half million far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities". Communist Polish and Soviet authorities maintained a figure "between 2.5 and 4 million". The figure "4,000,000" was used on the original Auschwitz memorial plaques. The plaques did not specify the ethnicities of victims. In 1983, French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations to estimate the number killed at Auschwitz, arriving at 1.613 million dead, including 1.44 million Jews and 146,000 Catholic Poles. A larger study started later by Franciszek Piper used timetables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate 960,000 Jewish deaths and 140,000-150,000 ethnic Polish victims, along with 23,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), a figure that has met with significant agreement from other scholars. (Wikipedia)















Agnieszka Akula @ Myspace