Juergen Teller: Auschwitz Birkenau

Shortly before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, German photographer Juergen Teller (born 1964) traveled there with others. They spent days walking through the memorial sites, and Teller photographed what he saw: barracks, gas chambers and latrines, electric fences, drawings, photos and messages documenting the lives of the prisoners and their deaths--but also mundane things such as parking signs and souvenir stores, visitors and buses. Everything in these images has lost its innocence, even the grass and winter sunlight streaming through windows. Each detail captured by Teller is a trace of the world of the victims and their perpetrators, part of the horror of this 190-hectare death factory in which more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered. Teller's photographs preserve what is there, past and present.