Invited Talk : Conférence d'Eric de Chassey

In 2014, the German painter Gerhard Richter painted four abstract monumental pictures that he titled Birkenau. In exhibitions, he has consistently chosen to accompany them with the four photographs that they come from. Taken in the Summer of 1944 by four members of the Sonderkommando of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination site (Alberto Errera, Alter Fajnzylberg, Abraham Dragon and Shlomo Dragon), these photographs show the two moments that immediately precede and follow the murder of Jews in a gas chamber. As abstract paintings, Richter’s Birkenau clearly ask for a close material reading, if one wants to understand their meaning. As documentary images, the Sonderkommando photographs are on the contrary usually considered without paying attention to their materiality, and have been displayed and reproduced, in altered and modified states, including by Richter. This paper will question both the understandability of abstract paintings if viewers only confront their material presence and the consequences of the absence of respect for the material identity of images explicitly made for reproduction.