Bäcker

Heimrad Bäcker

The literary-artistic work of Heimrad Bäcker centers on the Shoah. An “archaeologist of language”, he isolates selected documents and inserts
them into his system of reference entitled nachschrift (postscript) which is not a fictionalizing transcript in novel form or prose of memory, but documentary literature using the aesthetic of concrete poetry. In the field of pictorial representation, Bäcker recasts this approach as “documentary photography.” From the late 1960s, he has photographed topographic traces of the Nazi killing machine, primarily at the former Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps. The motifs of these photographic
works, often realized as sequences of images, are not the canonized symbols
of the Shoah that have emerged from an iconography of genocide since the end of the war. Instead, the photographer’s isolating gaze falls on apparently trivial topographic and architectural traces or on media documentation of the Shoah and related trials on television. But even in his treatment of a familiar motif like the “Todesstiege” (a notorious stone stairway connecting
the camp with its granite quarry, the site of many accidents and murders), Bäcker keeps his distance from the usual codes of consternation by his use
of increasing abstraction.