Marco Senaldi on the Paradox of Photographing Auschwitz

Marco Senaldi, a philosopher and contemporary art theorist, reflects on the challenge of representing Auschwitz. He describes the initial disorientation upon arrival, where the camp feels both familiar from countless media images and shockingly real in its physical presence. Senaldi argues that recounting Auschwitz is paradoxical: it is both an attempt to articulate the void of inhumanity and an effort overshadowed by an excess of information. The central question, he contends, is not about images of Auschwitz but about the act of photography at the site itself. At Auschwitz, there are no explicit bans on photography; instead, the responsibility falls on each visitor to decide whether to capture an image, thereby confronting the ethical choice between commemoration and profanation. Senaldi notes that the museum section of Auschwitz I resembles a contemporary art museum, where accumulations of objects—spoons, prosthetics, glasses, shoes, hair, suitcases—serve as powerful testimony, more so than photographs or drawings. He draws a parallel between the pile of suitcases at the camp and Fabio Mauri's 1993 work "Il Muro Occidentale o del Pianto" (The Western Wall or Wailing Wall), a stack of suitcases that serves as a warning beyond any image. The article was published in Artribune Magazine #30.