15.11.2019
Award: Deutscher Fotobuchpreis (German Photo Book Prize) in Silver for the book Auschwitz - Fall of the Modern Age
Info: Deutscher Fotobuchpreis

Many thanx to the text authors: Riccardo Bavaj and Matthias Noell and to the Mitteldeutscher Verlag Halle (Saale).

Auschwitz – Fall of the Modern Age is a publication of the photo-documentary project Auschwitz – Ultima Ratio of the Modern Age. The project is a photographic investigation of the connections between modernity and the Holocaust. The visual analysis is based on the architecture and infrastructure of the largest extermination camp in the Third Reich: Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lewandowski's photographs show building types as well as devices whose function was the mass killing of people. To do justice to this purpose, the planners and executives of these National So-cialist crimes made use of ration-alist means based on the basic principles of modernism. These principles were originally intended to serve the creation of surplus value, which was also understood as an improvement of the human condition. The Holocaust has revealed the ambivalence of the methods of modernity. The book is accompanied by two contributions by renowned historians Riccardo Bavaj and Matthias Noell.