PHOTOGRAPHER

Recently a time machine turned up in a Vienna used bookstore – 400 immaculate, carefully labeled color 35mm slides. Among the oldest chromatic transparencies known, the photos were taken by a hobbyist who was beta-testing experimental full-spectrum emulsions invented by the German graphics company now known as Afga. But it is not so much the pictures that concern PHOTOGRAPHER, but rather their subject. For the enthusiastic shutterbug, Walter Genewein, worked for Nazis as an accountant overseeing the notorious Lodz Ghetto slave-labor complex, a prison quarter that for many Polish Jews was the penultimate stop before the crematoria of Auschwitz and Kulmhulf. Genewein, emotionally blind to the genocide quickening around him, dutifully snapped tasteful stills of daily life around his office. We are accustomed to seeing the Holocaust in the black-and-white of newsreels or “Schindler's List.” Now, behold the yellow of the Jewish stars, the ruddy complexions of well-fed guards, even a visiting Himmler, and the postcard-blue skies that smiled down on the murder of millions. Combined with a chilling chronology of management memos, survivors' accounts, and Genewein's own banal words, the slides testify to the 20th-century's most infamous machinery of death, in living color. (In Polish and German with English subtitles)