"Inside Corridor of Camp Jailhouse"
The jailhouse contained a small number of cells laid out along a central hallway. At the museum, the doors of these cells stood open. One cannot exaggerate the sense of doom and concealed history that still hung about them.
To call forth the terrible ghosts of this actual place, I have transformed the yellow light cast by bulbs along the central hallway into the color of splattered blood. I go back and forth about the Grand-Guignol portrayal here, realizing full well that what a modern culture desensitized by slasher movies and mayhem on the nightly news does not need is more spilled blood to drink in.
Even so, my visual handling seeks to convey what can too easily go missing when our minds know this is all just a Hollywood restaging, not the genuine murder spot in time and space. Mankind's depraved jailhouse still manufactures many other blood-drenched horrors almost daily. The old camp museum and its unthinkable past gives us, maybe, a slanted and indirect angle of view to our unthinkable present.
TITLE - "Inside Corridor of Camp Jailhouse"
WHERE - Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Museum, Oranienburg, Germany (2015)