Auschwitz-B
seen by Raymond Depardon
exhibition

Thursday June 26, 2025 Sunday November 9, 2025

In 1979, for two weeks, photographer and director Raymond Depardon made a series of black and white photographs on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These images, commissioned by the magazine Paris Match, were published just after their production in several international magazines.

It is an Auschwitz-Birkenau under the snow that Raymond Depardon discovers. The immaculate whiteness of the landscape contrasts with the darkness of the buildings and fences of the camp and the vegetation that emerges here and there. An impression of solitude and geometric immensity emerges, punctuated by elements reminiscent of humans: a prisoner’s dress, a grass, a tree. Not a living soul. Covered with powdered white, the camp, and what we know about it, is indeed there, and Raymond Depardon grasps its most significant elements.

Twenty years later, he will return with Claudine Nougaret and their two sons for a personal visit to these places, an approach they consider essential.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Shoah, Raymond Depardon agreed to the publication of a photographic series that reports on the site, which has become a museum since 1947. These photographs had never been the subject of an exhibition or a dedicated publication.

On the occasion of the exhibition, "Auschwitz Birkenau vu par Raymond Depardon", the photographer-director has chosen to entrust all the photographs to the Shoah Memorial.

The photographs will be preserved at the Shoah Memorial and available for consultation on the online catalogue of the photo library.

Requests for use must be addressed to the Magnum agency.

Coordination: Sophie Nagiscarde, Clara Lainé, assisted by Andréa Pechin, Shoah Memorial.

Scenography: Studio Adrien Gardère – Adrien Gardère, Carole Pfendler, Juliane Servais

New! Discover the cycle around the exhibition

INTERVIEW WITH RAYMOND DEPARDON

Excerpt from the interview with Raymond Depardon, published on the occasion of the exhibition, in the book-in-law Auschwitz-Birkenau vu par Raymond Depardon.

The magazine Paris Match sends you in winter 1979 on the site of the former camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau to make a photographic report. How do you approach this type of place when you are a documentarian, filmmaker, and photographer? Did you look into it before leaving? Had you seen images taken by other photographers?

Raymond Depardon:

No, I didn’t really look into it. In 1979, I had just moved from the Gamma agency to the Magnum agency, which was an event for me. I was coming back from several rather difficult reports and I was still a bit orphaned by Gilles Caron, who had disappeared ten years earlier in Cambodia, captured by the Khmer Rouge. With other photographers, we were all very marked by Vietnam.

As often happens in newspapers – it’s almost a caricature – I’m asked: "Raymond, could you go report on Auschwitz for Paris Match?" So I answer yes and end up there one morning. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life. I asked myself: "What on earth is this? A film set? A horror movie?"

So I decided to visit everything. Every day, I would discover the horror. I was trying to visit little by little, because I had to work; otherwise, I would have been stunned, I would have sat down and done nothing. I start with the Auschwitz barracks. The site is in very good condition: an old Polish barracks. We recognize the gate, of course. It was in winter, under the snow. I worked meticulously. I admit that I was trying to keep my cool. When you’re a photographer, you have to keep your cool.

What equipment did you work with?

At the time, I wasn’t working from the bedroom yet and I still had a lot of very slow films that I used to photograph the desert. I thought they would be perfect and that I would work on my feet.

How were you received by the memorial staff? Were you guided to visit the camp?

Yes, at first they showed me the places where people slept, the ovens, the place where trains arrived, the place where Jews disembarked.

They also showed me films. I was very impressed by the film of the Red Army cameramen who discover the camp. It’s a crazy, incredible film. For me, it’s one of the most moving films in the world because I think they were really surprised. I think they knew, but they didn’t expect what they saw.

They filmed with a KS-4 camera, a Soviet copy of the Eyemo Bell & Howell, which is a great camera. When I did Ian Palach in 1969, I filmed a minute of silence with this Bell & Howell camera. It’s a portable camera that doesn’t protect you so much from what you’re filming. Afterwards, while filming Faits divers or filming in courthouses, I was protected by the camera. Fortunately, otherwise I would have snapped. For Claudine, who was recording, it was more difficult: she was out in the open. People were staring at her and calling her out to find help.

In this Soviet film, they do something I would never have dared to do: fixed shots of the few surviving people. One imagines the winter of 1945. They were released, but they did not leave the camp. They must be relieved to see the Soviets coming, but they are in such a state... The cameramen make close-ups of people clinging to the barbed wire, static shots, like photos. We see, for example, the eyebrows or the mouth of these survivors who barely move.

I have the impression that before the end of the 1970s there had been little talk about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Speech by Raymond Depardon at the inauguration

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex

Established by the Nazi authorities on the outskirts of the small town of Oświęcim, the Auschwitz complex was deployed from spring 1940 in a region particularly rich in raw materials: Silesia, newly conquered and attached to the Reich. Between the Vistula and the Soła, the SS created the area of interest of KL Auschwitz with an area of more than 40 km 2. This area, under permanent surveillance, had to be as sparsely populated as possible in order to prevent the Poles from becoming potential witnesses of what was happening in the region and to avoid as much as possible contacts between civilians and deportees. Initially conceived as one of the Reich’s concentration camps, Auschwitz quickly established itself as a gigantic concentration complex with numerous sub-camps, near which several German companies were located. From the spring of 1942, Auschwitz also established itself as the deadliest death center for European Jews.

Within this vast ensemble, three spaces stand out in particular:

Auschwitz I, the main camp (or stump camp), founded by the SS in early 1940 within a former barracks of the Polish army.
Auschwitz II (Birkenau), whose construction began in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, a few kilometers from the main camp. From 1942 until the summer of 1944, when the number of deportees peaked at nearly 100,000, Birkenau was a huge concentration camp, but also the place where the process of mass extermination of European Jews took place.
Auschwitz III (Monowitz or Buna-Monowitz), where from the autumn of 1942, near the village of Monowitz, a huge industrial complex producing synthetic rubber for the German company I.G. Farben was established. The camp, which is deployed near the factory, becomes so important that in November 1943 it becomes a full-fledged camp with its own subcamps.

Gradually emptied of its still valid deportees between the autumn and the month of January 1945, and discovered by the Soviets on 27 January of the same year, the Auschwitz complex disappears but the places remain and evolve. The Polish authorities take over the site of the former concentration camp. They handed over the remaining barracks of Birkenau to the local population and, under pressure from Polish survivors of the camp, decided to make Auschwitz I a museum. The law of 2 July 1947 on the establishment of the Martyrdom Museum in Oświęcim, passed by the Polish Parliament, officially confirms the decision to preserve ad eternam the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and to create a museum there. (which today is called the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum). The weight of the memory of Auschwitz in the collective imagination, especially on a French scale because it was the place where the overwhelming majority of Jews deported from France were murdered, is very important.