I don’t think I’ll be able to make the book launch of Himmelstrasse by Brian Griffin at the Photographers’ Gallery tonight, though the book with its images of the railway tracks in Poland which took around three million people to the death camps seems a powerful and impressive personal response to the Holocaust. And any opportunity to meet Brian is always rewarding.
I’ve twice been to the area of Poland close to Auschwitz, and never felt able to make the visit there, always telling myself “perhaps next time.” It would have been difficult to fit in to a busy schedule, but I think this was just an excuse.
The images of the rails, all single track, running through areas of forest have a desolation, seem all to be made in winter, a few with snow on the ground. Some are a little overgrown, but most seem still to be in use, with occasional track-side signs and still shining rails. The 15 images on Brian’s own web site are half in black and white and half in colour (as well as the Nazi-style design book cover with its title in ‘black type’ and simple graphic design in red and white.)
Although most publicity for the book seems to have chosen the black and white images – and particularly one with two sofas and a chair neatly at the side of the line – I think the colour images are perhaps more straightforwardly emotional, with their sombre browns and dull winter greens, with sometimes sparse patches of snow. A couple also have the blue sky of ‘Himmel‘ in the cynical Nazi joke which gives the book its title.
The single track in most images is an appropriate metaphor for what was for almost all a one way journey, although the death trains must of course have returned empty on the same rails before their next journey. Much of Poland’s rail system that I saw ten years ago seemed to be single track like these with only very occasional trains making their way slowly along them.
I’ve not seen a copy of the actual book, which looks excellently produced by Browns Editions, though the colour in the nine double page spreads reproduced on their web site seems rather garish compared with that on the photographer’s own site. At £50 it’s perhaps too expensive to add to my already rather large collection, though I’m tempted to do so.
The book will have a second launch at the New York Art Book Fair 2015.
Himmelstrasse
Brian Griffin
Published 2015
Designed by Browns
297mm x 232mm
Hardback
120 pages
69 black and white images
33 colour images
Edition of 500 hand numbered.
ISBN 9780992819415