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An old timeworn mirror covered in black spots vaguely reflects a brightly lit window. A beautiful romantic image. But the location where the American photographer Corrie McCluskey captured this image is far from romantic—a washing room in the compound of Theresienstadt, a processing camp from the Second World War where Jews and other prisoners where held before being sent on to the Auschwitz death camp. The photo of the mirror symbolizes McCluskey's desire to confront spaces which contained dark monumental events in the past. She made photographs of several Eastern European concentration camps and also in the famous, and once very notorious American prison island, Alcatraz. The series came into being separately but now hangs together under one roof at the Fotogalerie Lichtzone under one name: Incarceration. Actually they are incomparable worlds. In one place guilty people were locked up, in the other innocent people couldn’t escape a horrible death. McCluskey saw in both places instances where both guilty and innocent people lost their identities in extreme, almost industrialized systems. She presents this in sober registrations of endless rows of tiny uniform cells in Alcatraz and barracks stretching to the horizon in Auschwitz. Some photos are of shocking beauty like a detailed photo of a mountain of empty cans with a lovely soft sheen. But when you read the title you realize that the canisters once contained Zyklon-B gas that was used to kill millions in the death camps. Because there are no people in McCluskey's photos you are forced to confront the stark reality of the spaces. But still you can feel the presence of the people who occupied these spaces in the past. Slowly these images of the concentration camps call up that well-known feeling of "this, never again." This echoes the message scratched into the bars of an Alcatraz isolation cell, as if someone hoped he could cut his way to freedom: “NO NO NO NO…” UK, Onafhankelijk Weekblad voor de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (NL), June 13, 2002 (N37) |