There are strong echoes here of Blaufuks’ response to the Holocaust.  Of course Blaufuks’ art is not drawn from an experience of the camps, his richly allusive work reflects upon the Holocaust through varied forms and layers of representation, a mediation that also suggests the impossibility of comprehension or understanding.  But his art comes close to Antelme’s work of literature in terms of its affirmation, in the humanity of the emphasis on daily life and the everyday and the overriding faith in culture and creativity, the belief that in spite of it all, art can “enhance life.”

Mark Durden is a writer, artist and academic.  He has published extensively on photography and contemporary art.  Publications include Dorothea Lange (2001, 2012), Fifty Key Writers on Photography (2012), Photography Today (2014), with David Campbell, Variable Capital (2007) and with Ken Grant, Double Take: Portraits from the Keith Medley Archive (2013). He is part of the artists’ group Common Culture and currently Professor of Photography at the University of South Wales, UK.