Images of the World and the Inscriptions of War / Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges

A woman arrives in Auschwitz; the camera captures her movements. The woman perceives the camera’s look and her eyes shift to avoid the lens. If she were on a shopping street, this is how she would avoid the look of a man – by just looking past him into a shop window. This looking away is an attempt to search for a world with shopping streets, gentlemen and shop windows; a world far away from here.
The camp, which has been build to destroy her, is run by the SS, and the photographer preserving her beauty on film is from the same SS. What a combination: preserving and destroying!
The Nazis did indeed take photographs in Auschwitz. Two SS men were commissioned to document the camp. How are we to regard such images? The SS took this picture, their camera was a part of camp equipment. How can one show this photograph and, at the same time put it, as it were, in quotation marks?