Adam Bujak - Oświęcim - 1972

First edition by acclaimed Polish photographer Bujak of Auschwitz-Birkenau as seen over two decades after the Holocaust, featuring 122 deep, finely screened photogravure plates (many double-page), with scarce laid-in translation booklet (English, French, German and Russian) and dust jacket.

Fine condition with original photographic jacket!

In the late 1960s and early 70s, the world renewed its attempt to “achieve some kind of historical perspective” on the Holocaust. Committed to a belief that it is “vital that photography should record what happened… the genocide photobook is an important genre within the remit of concerned photographers” such as leading Polish photographer Adam Bujak (Parr & Badger II: 244, 236). His photographs of Oswiecim-Brzezinka, taken in the early 1970s and presented here in 122 powerful photogravures, pay witness, as sculptor Henry Moore once said, to that “soil where the dead are most present.” Essay by Adolf Gawalewicz; text in Polish.

Despite the simple, blatant title, Adam Bujak's album is not a topographical documentation of the concentration camp's grounds but a kind of metaphorical, symbolic, and emotive portrait of the place.