Panayis Chrysovergis

The book “Auschwitz seen by ss”, is a  collection of three testimonies written by SS, based on the concentration camp. It is the starting point of my work, in which I record everything I witnessed at the place after I read these testimonies. The autobiography of Rudolf Hoess, the camp commander, the ” Journal ” of Johann Kremer, the camp doctor and the writings of Pery Broad, camp guard, describe the final solution for the Jewish problem ordered by Adolf Hitler and executed by his commanders. This book was what inspired me to go and see hell, face to face as well as the beastliness of man. My journey will produce 18 black & white and colour diptyques. Because my approach to these images is descriptive, I did not want any caption or text to accompany them. But what word is there to describe such wretchedness? We are obliged to look at  this human mystery straight in the eye, this huge paradox that created a human being which, while being endowed with sensitivity by nature, he is proved capable of commiting the greatest brutality.   We must always remember this brutality. Here the picture describes but it does not narrate. I present isolated images that combine diptyques as a series of images through time and space that can lead the viewer to thinking – like forming a specific vision and mainly more personal. The black & white images invite us to imagine and travel in the past, while colour brings us back to present and this complexity forms a visual context in which we travel and through which I force all of us to put captions to my images and execute both my and your duty to remember.