FMP

FMP - Final major project

Idea - I want take to photographs of something that I have interest in, something that I feel connected to, something that will mean something to me but will also show the viewers exactly what experience I had undertaken to get the photographs I would have managed to take.

I want my images to be of a certain area/place that shows emotions of many different kinds, I would like my images to give people the wow factor so I decided that I would have to choose a subject that was part of the past as well as part of the future.

There are many places in the whole of the world where its history has made an impact on the present, so I did some research into several places that would have these factors........

The Chernobyl disaster

was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially the Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.
The Chernobyl disaster is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011).The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles. The official Soviet casualty count of 31 deaths has been disputed, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for.

The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper river. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite.The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.According to official post-Soviet data, about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.



Aerial view of the damaged core on 3 May 1986. Roof of the turbine hall is damaged.



Radiation levels


To this day you are still not able to step foot in the whole of the area unless you have been fully equipped with the right clothing and enough knowledge to know what you will be looking at when you enter the area.

A few images of what it looks like to this day.............

 

The 1960 Chile Earthquake

The most powerful earthquake ever recorded struck near Valdivia, Chile on May 22, 1960, at 2:11 PM local time. As many as 6,000 people were killed. Many more would have been, had it not been for Chile’s preparedness for earthquakes, and the remote location of the epicenter.
Eyewitnesses reported that the entire world appeared as if God had seized one end of it like a rope, and slung it as hard as he could. 40% of the houses in Valdivia were razed to the ground. Cordon Caulle, a nearby active volcano, was ripped open and forced to erupt.
The quake measured 9.5 in magnitude, and 35 foot high waves were recorded 6,000 miles away. Of all the seismic energy of the 20th Century, including the 2004 Indian Ocean quake, 25% was concentrated in the 1960 Chile quake.
It caused 82 foot high waves to travel down the Chilean coast. Hilo, Hawaii was destroyed. The quake possessed twice the surface energy yield the 2004 Indian Ocean quake, and equalled 178 billion tons of TNT. This would have powered the entire United States, at 2005 energy consumption levels, for 740 years.

World War 2 - 1940-45
Auschwitz/Birkenau

Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II. It was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, consisting of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Auschwitz III–Monowitz, also known as Buna–Monowitz and 45 satellite camps.

Auschwitz had for a long time been a German name for Oświęcim, the town by and around which the camps were located; the name "Auschwitz" was made the official name again by the Nazis after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka, referred originally to a small Polish village that was destroyed by the Nazis to make way for the camp.
Auschwitz II–Birkenau was designated by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the Third Reich's Minister of the Interior, as the place of the "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe". From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camp's gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe. The camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified after the war at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation).

Today the accepted figure is 1.3 million, around 90 percent of them Jewish. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, some 400 Jehovah's Witnesses and tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labour, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.

On January 27, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops, a day commemorated around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 1947, Poland founded a museum on the site of Auschwitz I and II, which by 2010 had seen 29 million visitors—1,300,000 annually—pass through the iron gates crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes [you] free").

Images from the past -

 

 

 

Image from then and now -

 

Images from the present -

 

 



 

After looking a quite a few horrible things that happened in the past I decided that I felt more connected to what happened in World War 2 at Auschwitz and Birkenau as I have family in Poland and have been going to Poland for most of my life yet I had never visited these camps. So I did more research into what happened all those years ago and also what would I experience if I was to visit Auschwitz myself.

More Research..................



The Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim collect, preserve, and provide access to archival materials connected mostly with the history of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and to a lesser extent with other concentration camps as well.

The collection includes original German camp records, copies of documents obtained from other institutions in Poland and abroad, source material of postwar provenance (memoirs, accounts by former prisoners, material from the trials of Nazi war criminals, etc.), photographs, microfilms, negatives, documentary films, scholarly studies, reviews, lectures, exhibition scenarios, film scripts, and search results.

Image of a prisoner - each person had an individual number, they had to remember their number as they would be referred to as this all the time they where in the camp, later on they would have their number tattooed on their arm so they could never forget it.

 

 

From liberation to the opening of the Memorial

 

From January 17 to 21, 1945, the Auschwitz administration evacuated about 58 thousand prisoners into the depths of the Reich. At the same time, the SS were burning the camp records. On January 20, they blew up crematoria and gas chambers II and III in Birkenau. Just after the end of the evacuation, on January 23, they set fire to Kanada II, the warehouse full of property plundered from the Jews. Three days later, they blew up gas chamber and crematorium V. When Red Army troops entered the grounds of the camp on the 27th, they found about 7 thousand prisoners there, most of them sick and at the limits of physical exhaustion.

 

After liberation, the Red Army was in charge of the grounds. Soldiers of the Soviet medical corps and members of the Polish Red Cross (Polski Czerwony Krzyż - PCK), with much help from the local population, set up hospitals that treated about 4,800 sick and physically exhausted prisoners.

At first, the patients received treatment in three parts of the liberated camp—the main camp, Birkenau, and Monowitz. From the second half of February, all treatment was administered in seven specially prepared blocks at the main camp, where conditions were best. Patients requiring specialist treatment were transferred to hospitals in Cracow. Despite intensive care, some died—mostly in February and March. A total of about 600 ex-prisoners died while the hospitals were open.

At first, the hospitals also treated liberated children. In February and March, however, the children were transferred from the camp to shelters in Katowice, Cracow, Rabka, Warsaw-Okęcie, and Harbutowice near Cracow.

 

From June, the size of the PCK hospital was reduced as the number of patients declined, but also because German POWs were being quartered in the blocks. The PCK hospital closed on October 1, 1945.   

 

Other priority tasks included removing and burying the approximately 600 corpses found at the main camp and Birkenau sites. Block 11 at the main camp was used as a morgue, and the corpses were brought there. In Birkenau, they were placed in a large pit dug at the end of the railroad platform, between the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria II and III. The bodies of prisoners who died after liberation were also placed there. Doctors from the Soviet commission investigating German war crimes performed autopsies on some of the corpses before burial.

 

A ceremonial funeral for victims was held on February 28, 1945. A funeral procession brought 470 bodies from Birkenau to be buried in a grave dug near the Lagererweiterung blocks just outside the main camp. All the corpses from block 11 had been placed in the grave beforehand. It is estimated that about 700 Auschwitz victims rest together in this common grave.

 

Another important task was helping the prisoners in relatively good physical condition return home. Some set out on their own, and others in transports organized by the Red Army and the PCK. Several score transports were formed up and sent on their way between mid-February and July. Former prisoners from outside Poland were taken to assembly points in Cracow, Katowice, and Bielsko, and from there to resettlement camps in the Ukraine and Byelorussia. In the spring, several score prisoners sailed from Odessa to Marseilles, and in the autumn, after the end of the war, trains carried another group through Romania, Hungary, and Austria to Western Europe. Missions from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Romania, and Hungary came to the Auschwitz site to evacuate their citizens.

All of those who left received PCK certificates to prove that they had been in Auschwitz—the only identity document they had—along with passes in Polish and Russian, issued by the Voivodship office, which entitled them to help from the military and civilian authorities on their way home. The survivors also received dry rations for 3 to 5 days and, in some cases, modest sums of pocket money.

 

PCK staff also prepared a list of the names of former prisoners on the basis of the partially extant camp records and information received from survivors. This list was the basis for providing several thousand families with information about relatives who had been in Auschwitz. Over time, PCK offices in Cracow and Warsaw took over this informational work, before the creation of an information office (now the Office for Information on Former Prisoners) at the State Museum in Auschwitz in 1954.

The first years of the memorial

In April 1946, the Ministry of Culture and Art (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki – MKiS) sent a group of former prisoners, led by Tadeusz Wąsowicz, to Oświęcim to protect the site of the Auschwitz camp and set up a museum there.At the beginning of 1947, Ludwik Rajewski, the head of the Department of Museums and Monuments in the MKiS, presented an organizational plan according to which the Museum would be a “historical document.”

Taking it further

So after looking more into what happened then and what is happening now at the camps I feel I have more of a connection with the place itself, so I have decided this is defiantly the place that I would like to visit to get the photographs for my exhibition.

I have looked into travelling to Poland for a few days, this would mean booking a flight to Krakow and booking a hotel for a few days.

I have booked the trip!!!

I will be travelling to Krakow in Poland on the 16th of March to the 21st of March, I have spoken to my Polish friends and they have informed me that it is going to be quite cold, so to take warm clothes and wrap up. I have also booked into a cheap hotel for the days I will be staying there. I booked all this online, the flight through Easyjet and the hotel through Trivago, in total the trip has cost me £120 for the 5 days.

I want to take a full frame camera with me on my trip so I have borrowed the Nikon D700 from Kevin at university with the standard lens. I have taken it out a week early so I can get used to it and don't have to spend too much time doing this when I arrive in Poland. I also purchased new Memory cards for the camera.

I have also spoken to Richard about what type of images I am hoping to come back with and we came to the decision of just going and taking as many images as possible to try and not miss anything while I am there.

I also did some research into photographers that had been to Auschwitz to get some inspiration, the main photographer that inspired me was Simon Norfolk,

Simon Norfolk’s extraordinary body of work, For Most Of It I Have No Words (1999), investigates what Norfolk regards as genocidal events of the twentieth century, reflecting on the act of forgetting as physical reminders of the atrocities disappear from the landscape and away from our consciousness.

It begins in Rwanda (1994) where partially clad skeletons and violated refuges still bear witness to individual lives and deaths.

The images travel back through time, drawing a thread through an array of twentieth century events: Cambodia’s Year Zero in 1975; the free bombing zones developed from 1962 in Vietnam; the use of the defoliant Agent Orange; extermination camps in Auschwitz; the bombing of Dresden; the mass graves of the Ukraine; and the fields of Anatolia where Armenians were marched to their deaths.

The series concludes in the Omaheke Desert, where the sands of the Namibian desert have erased the final traces of Herero nomadic people, killed under German colonial rule in 1904.
Originally completed in 1998, and exhibited at Open Eye the following year, this project marked a turning point in Norfolk’s practice.

Simon Norfolk was born in Nigeria in 1963. He currently lives and works in Brighton.



Back from Poland

Wow what an experience!!!!!!!!!!!!

Auschwitz is more than what you could ever expect it to be. I booked the trip through my hotel, it was 160 zloty, this is around £32. The bus picked me up from the hotel, it was an hour and half drive to Auschwitz itself. When I got there I was greeted my a tour guide who told us to stick to our group and go and pick up some earphones and receiver.

After this the guide told us exactly what would be happening, she took all of us to each area of the camp and explained what had happened in this specific area. It was hard to believe that where I was walking is where many people that would be set to death had walked up and down the same path.

The tour guide took us in some of the buildings to show us photographs that had been taken while the war was happening, they took these photographs secretly because if they had been caught they would have been killed there and then.

In some of the buildings there was many cabinets of peoples belongings, some of these being shoes, briefcases, cups, brushes, artificial limbs, you could take photographs of all these upsetting items but there was one whole room just full of all the hair that had been shaven of the prisoners heads, this was extremely upsetting!!

It was very cold whilst here, -15 and snowing, this added more of a atmosphere to it.

Once we had all walked round Auschwitz we got on a bus and hey took us to camp number 2, Birkenau, this is where most of the exterminations happened, in the gas chambers at the far end of the camp. When you see the entrance to the camp you know exactly where you are because of how world wide known it is. when you reach the bottom of the camp a memorial has been built right next to the main gas chamber which the Nazis had tried to get rid of to try and hide all the evidence so all that remains there is the remains but you can still make out what it was.

We then went on to see 2 of the buildings, one was full of wooden bunkbeds, 3 beds high, each bed had to fit 5 people, if you was on the top book you would get wet from the rain, on the bottom bunk you would become severely uncomfortable because you would have to sleep on concrete.

In the second building there was just rows and rows on holes in concrete, this is what was used for their toilets, near the entrance there was hooks on the wall, some of the prisoners would be tied to these like horses if they had done anything slightly wrong.

This was the end of the tour, it was mind blowing, everyone should visit this at some point in their life, everyone should understand more as to what happened.

On the journey back to the hotel I had a lot of thinking to do, everything in your life just seems so easy. I can not believe what they had to go through and my heart well and truly goes out to all the people that lost their lives and all the people that lost part of their family!!!!!!!!!!!

Back at uni

Once back at uni I wanted to edit my images to all black and white to give them more of a ambience. I shot all my images in Raw and Jpeg. Once I had edited them I showed them all to my tutors and they each told me which where their favourite. I then had all of them printed on matt paper as I though glossy paper would take away some of the messages behind the images.

I then stuck the images on the wall in Uni so I could see them as a collection.

For my exhibition I want a banner with 6 of my images on, a book with all my images in and a business card for people to see what type of photography I work with.

My images