At a glance
■ “12 Nazi Concentration Camps: Photographs by James Friedman” continues through Oct. 28 at the Angela Meleca Gallery, 144 E. State St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Call 614-340-6997 or visit www.angelamelecagallery. com. a Nazi concentration camp?”
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the photos is their color. Photographs made of the camps just after the end of the war were predominantly shot in black and white, reinforcing the bleak vision of death and torture that went on there. During a lecture he gave at the International Center of Photography in New York, Friedman has said, a member of the audience was outraged that he shot his photos in color, claiming that the Holocaust occurred in black and white without bright blue skies and puffy clouds.
Indeed, the color feels unsettling in “Survivor of three Nazi concentration camps, survivors’ reunion, Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin, Poland.” A woman stands in the forefront of the picture (in front of children with bicycles) wearing her gray striped prison uniform, over which hangs a bright-red-andwhite sash honoring her as a survivor.
Another photograph shows a woman looking into a pond in a serene woodland setting near Auschwitz II (Birkenau). Friedman’s notes describe how he learned after he captured the photo that a New Yorker magazine writer had dipped his hand into the pond and found bone fragments from the Auschwitz crematorium.
“Mannequin of Nazi SS Officer, Fort Breendonk concentration camp, near Brussels, Belgium,” one of two super-large digital prints presented in the exhibit, shows a lighted display in what were former prisoner cells. The glass in front of mannequin bears smudges and drips from where visitors had spit.
Gallery owner Angela Meleca urged Friedman to hang the photos without their printed descriptions, allowing visitors first to focus on the visuals. But Friedman’s extensive notes are available on printed sheets, and they offer valuable context as a visitor studies the photos.
The photographs are being shown for the first time in their entirety in Columbus.
Friedman notes that the Nazis, during their reign, established more than 40,000 concentration camps, with the first, Dachau, built in 1933. Six million Jews, gypsies, people with disabilities and others were slain during the Holocaust.
His photographs, Friedman said, “are visual memoirs that document an uncommon and psychically perilous journey through six countries and 12 sites and reveal a malevolence that is not somehow frozen in time or removed from our modern lives but, rather, is still palpable . . . years after the Holocaust ended.”