In 2005 the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton in the United Kingdom commissioned Paul Antick to produce fourteen billboards from his art project itourist? Each of the billboards featured photographs taken by Antick at various locations in Central and Eastern Europe that are associated with the Holocaust, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Madjanek, Chelmno, Belzec, and Terezin (formerly Theresienstadt). In December 2006, the itourist? billboards were simultaneously exhibited on the streets of Southampton and London, and on the highway between Prague and Terezin in the Czech Republic. In October 2009 seven were shown in a public park in the medieval Polish city of Torun.

JANE TYNAN: Can you tell me where the itourist? project began?

PAUL ANTICK: When I was working at the University of Westminster in the mid-1990s as a part-time tutor I found a book on someone's desk called In the Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941. It was a collection of photographs by Willy Georg, a soldier in the German Wehrmacht. Apparently he'd entered the ghetto and then photographed what he found there. I was flipping through this book and an image caught my attention: a young man who looked like a beggar. He was dressed in rags and I don't think he had any shoes on his feet. He was staring directly at the camera and what struck me about the picture was that it wasjjke looking into a mirror. He reminded me very much of how I used to look, or how I thought I used to look, when I was that age - I think he was between 17 and 20. Photographs often interest me, but they don't often affect me very much. This one did. It was an uncanny thing, seeing that picture.

I went to Auschwitz for the first time with a friend nine years ago. But I'd grown up with this thing people called "the Holocaust"; I grew up in a Jewish family in England and it was a word that kept cropping up. As I recall, nobody ever had much to say about Auschwitz as such, nothing sustained; instead, words like "Holocaust," "Auschwitz," "Germans" would be dropped into conversations about other things. So there was an air of familiarity about the Holocaust, and I remember sometimes not feeling comfortable with the ways in which it was referred to. At the time, when I was a teenager, I think it felt to me like some people in my family derived a perverse kind of pleasure in identifying with it. Now I don't feel like that, or at least I don't just feel that. In fact I feel very differently about it. One of the things that was obviously extraordinary about the Holocaust was that it was dedicated to the systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group. What bothered me as a young man was the idea that some people who belonged to that group, people who weren't directly threatened by the Holocaust - for instance, the people in my immediate family - appeared to me determined to derive a weird form of kudos from having been indirectly touched by it. This made me quite angry. Now I think I realize that the Holocaust actually did touch them in very powerful ways, or at least that being brought up in a country - England - at a time when expressions of anti-Semitism were very common and in many ways perfectly acceptable, was something that profoundly affected them. Interestingly it seems easier foe' my family to identify with the Holocaust than their own. experiences of antiSemitism in England during the 1940s.

JT: You mentioned before that there was a darkroom at Auschwitz. Were you interested in how photography was used there?

PA: One of the things I realized was that photography was an important part of the administrative culture at Auschwitz. It seems they were compelled to record the details of their crimes, although of course they didn't believe that the things they were doing were criminal. Many of the people in the camp were photographed but interestingly hardly any images were created of what we now call "Nazi atrocities," and the few that do exist weren't, to my knowledge, sanctioned by German administrators. The photographs they took were generally mug shots used to take account of the people who were there. It was an administrative exercise. They didn't photograph those who went straight to the gas chambers, at least not in the same way. Perhaps they understood that, whilst not being criminal, such events were still rather "vulgar," if entirely necessary for the well being of the Reich. Instead, most of the photographs taken at Auschwitz were used to record those who would end up being worked to death.

JT: Why did you use a camera to make artworks about Holocaust tourism? Your images have a hyper-real quality, which is a bit unsettling in the context of a death camp.

PA: Some of the images resemble middle- to low-brow fashion photographs, the kind you might find in a certain type of style magazine or even mail order catalogs: the complete antithesis of the conventional "Holocaust photograph." They are all shot using mixed flash and daylight, which is an established convention in this kind of photography, as well as an approach that invests a kind of surreality into the image. One photograph of an attractive, young, dark-haired woman standing outside the women's barracks at Birkenau is very obviously suggestive of this type of fashion photography. I wanted images that were in many ways quite anodyne, not intrinsically unsettling at all, or at least not obviously so, although still visually appealing, in the way that other images that are used to promote commodities are appealing. I certainly didn't want to reference anything explicitly suggestive of the Holocaust itself. I didn't want the images to provoke the kind of responses that other images of the Holocaust generally do. In fact I didn't want to do anything about the Holocaust itself - about the event that took place. I'm more interested in what the Holocaust has become, in what it means now as well as the ways in which we make it mean anything at all. This project is a part of this and it's no accident that its aesthetics as well as its locations echo the kinds of forms and environments that we typically associate with the promotion and distribution of a certain class of commodity. Writers like Norman Finklestein have made much of the commodification of the Holocaust - Holocaust tourism being one example of this, and given that the relationship between photography and the promotion of commodities is so pronounced and that this project is designed to foreground this idea, it obviously made sense to use photography rather than, for example, line drawing.

JT: Why did you adopt this design scheme?

PA: I developed this with photographer and designer Syd Shelton. We were playing around with colors in Syd's studio one day and I suggested that rather than using an arbitrary color scheme, why don't we echo the color scheme that was used in the camp to designate categories of prisoner: pink for homosexuals, yellow for Jews, red for communists, etc. In addition to this, the colors in itourist? are extremely vibrant and attractive, which means that they could potentially motivate responses that are characteristic of the ways in which audiences often respond to this kind of very public visual material - advertising I mean. There's something reassuringly familiar about the colors, or at least about encountering colors like these on billboards.

JT: Is audience reaction important to you? It seems that you have a desire to cause the viewer to do a double take.

PA: The audience's reaction to the billboards in Poland was very interesting. Art Moves, which was an international festival of billboard art held in Torun in 2009, was organized by Joanna Górska and Rafal Goralski at Galería Rusz. Mark Titchner, Edward Burtynsky, and I were the principal artists. Joanna and Rafal had put seven itourist? billboards in a corner of Bydgoskim Przedmieáciu park in Torun, right next to the busy ring road that goes around the city. A lot of buses stopped by the park and many people walked through it on their way home. I should say that Torun is a monochromatic environment. My memory of the city is of one color, brown. Also, as far as I recall there were not very many billboard advertisements there, so it seemed to me that loud and brash color was something quite foreign to the architectural landscape in Torun. Partly because of this I think that peoples' responses were very different to the way that, for instance, people reacted to the billboards when they went up in Hackney in London. What I noticed in Torun was that their extravagant colors as well as the very graphic nature of their design immediately arrested most peoples' attention. I sat in the park for about four hours one day watching how people engaged with the billboards. Many people appeared to be very interested in the portraits, perhaps due to the way that people were shot, as well as the fact that they all looked stereotypically Polish - which meant that on one level there was something reassuringly familiar about them, albeit something slightly uncanny too, which I guess is the thing that makes them just a bit more interesting.

What I noticed was that very often people would look at the billboards once, while walking, then look away. Then, after a few seconds they would look again and stop. They would then turn forty-five degrees so that they could look at the images straight on. I suspect this happened when they finally registered the accompanying text, the place names. It seemed that the text - "Auschwitz-Birkenau" or "Madjanek," for instance - had remained almost incomprehensible to them for a few seconds, but then following their initial "enjoyment" of the images the meaning of those words kicked in and completely disrupted what they'd initially thought the billboards were all about. For me, this was a pleasurable and very dramatic moment. Originally I worked on the project with John Hansard Gallery and the billboards went up in Southampton and London, and also outside Terezin in the Czech Republic, which used to be Theresienstadt, a holding camp for Jews. But I think that because the relationship that Polish culture continues to have with the Holocaust remains quite fraught, the nature of responses to the project in Poland was always going to be quite different, and perhaps this was why what happened in Torun was so much more interesting than what happened elsewhere.

Maybe there is something quite juvenile about the whole project. I want it to take audiences by surprise. I want to shake them up a bit. I want the work to be disorientating. The people in that park in Torun looked disoriented and that was very satisfying for me. For an editorial photographer I imagine it's quite rare to see how an audience reacts to the pictures you take. This is hardly surprising because once you take the pictures they're obviously then distributed, and generally you simply don't know how people engage with them. In Torun it was different. Not only did I get a sense of how the pictures affected a particular audience, but I also actually saw how they effected certain physical changes in the audience - the way that they walked, looked, stopped walking, looked again, etc.

JT: You use a style of photography that could be described as glamorous. What can this photographic style say about Holocaust tourism?

PA: Billboards are promotional devices and, as such, they are inextricably linked to the idea of advertising, including travel advertising. But I think that if you wanted to advertise a trip to Paris or Rio de Janeiro, then you probably wouldn't use images quite like these because maybe they're a bit too flashy (quite literally) and also perhaps because, as a result, they verge on something that isn't quite "right." If they are slightly uncanny then this is probably enough to disqualify them as conventional travel shots. They are almost like caricatures of the attractive travel picture, a psychotic caricature because, quite apart from the Holocaust references, they're slightly out of synch with the language of conventional travel photography. That said, the posters do contain the name of a place, which means the image can potentially be read as a piece of travel promotion. And of course although the posters may not contain stereotypical travel photographs, because we know the world is an upside-down kind of place, we are therefore able to tolerate this kind of genre blurring - however inappropriate - so long as there are certain signposts there that enable us to understand it to be that thing it aspires to be, the travel image, albeit a rather novel variant of it. The young, attractive people in some of the photographs are other important signifiers that prompt us to associate the itourist? images with commercial travel photography. So perhaps they could work. Perhaps they do work. Whether they do or not, for me the point of the work is to unsettle the viewer. You should not be talking about this place, Auschwitz, in terms of a holiday or a weekend away, and presenting it to us as a break from our everyday lives. This is profoundly unacceptable. Just as it is objectionable to represent the site of mass extermination using the language of glamour, something which is bound up with the idea of that which is enviable: the beautiful model, an idyllic landscape, etc. My feeling is that all of this may be "unacceptable," but the project undertakes to perform this in quite playful ways, to explore how far you can go and how people react to this strange aesthetic. I would hope that this failure to offer reassurance is perhaps what makes it work.

JT: You mentioned before that the work puts a gloss on Holocaust experience and that you were Interested In exploring Its commodlflcation. Does this mix of art and fashion staged In Auschwitz reflect a desire to resist conventional views of the Holocaust?

PA: It seems ironic to me that debates about the representation of the Holocaust often hinge on ideas about acceptability. Sometimes this is explicit: Can or should the Holocaust be represented at all? - and sometimes it's implicit. Apart from anything else, the repetitious circulation of Margaret Bourke-White's images of skeletal camp victims at Buchenwald, or even Christian Boltanski's found images, confirm what kinds of images of the Holocaust are generally held to be tolerable and, by implication, what kinds of images are not. I don't think there's anything wrong with these images, but I do think it's disconcerting that their reassuring function or role appears to remain beyond question. I'm not really speaking about their content as such - which is often horrific - but the familiarity of the messages they contain. In fact it's not so much the messages that I object to but the idea of familiarity. For me the contradiction is that while those representations have become acceptable, the event they seek to represent remains profoundly unacceptable. That's why it seems appropriate to me for this diabolical event - and its cultural aftermath - to be represented in a manner that is at odds with the predictable way in which it is generally represented, or re-cycled, in our culture. We may have been enacting fashion rituals in the middle of a cemetery, but this is only monstrous if we believe that Holocaust images must always strike a poignant note. I want to challenge people's expectations about how the Holocaust can be visualized. Maybe the strategy I've used is already too familiar to be disruptive. This may be so, although it certainly didn't look that way in Torun.

Author affiliation:

JANE TYNAN is a lecturer at Centrat Saint Martins College of Art and Design in ^don. Her current research concerns war and visual culture.