Jenny Saville and Glen Luchford, Closed Contact
“She presses her skin against glass to disfigure and manipulate it, emphasizing her negative body image.”
Czeslawa Kwoka, age 14, appears in a prisoner identity photo provided by the Auschwitz Museum, taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working in the photography department at Auschwitz, the Nazi-run death camp where some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died during World War II. Czeslawa was a Polish Catholic girl, from Wolka Zlojecka, Poland, who was sent to Auschwitz with her mother in December of 1942. Within three months, both were dead. Photographer (and fellow prisoner) Brasse recalled photographing Czeslawa in a 2005 documentary: “She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn’t understand why she was there and she couldn’t understand what was being said to her. So this woman Kapo (a prisoner overseer) took a stick and beat her about the face. This German woman was just taking out her anger on the girl. Such a beautiful young girl, so innocent. She cried but she could do nothing. Before the photograph was taken, the girl dried her tears and the blood from the cut on her lip. To tell you the truth, I felt as if I was being hit myself but I couldn’t interfere. It would have been fatal for me.” (via the atlantic)
Before cameras, one’s image was either sculpted or painted. Prices charged by painters were not based on how many people were painted, but on how many limbs. Arms and legs are “limbs,” therefore including them would cost the buyer more. Hence the expression, “Okay, but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.” (The painting above, of John and Abigail Adams, would have been cheaper because no limbs are painted.)
Did not know that. Interesting.
Base By: Jahrenesis
