A genocide can be seen in its overflow of horrors. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camp discovered by the Red Army 80 years ago on January 27, 1945, it can be read in the remnants of industrialized death, with its rows of barracks, gas chambers, crematoria, mountains of hair, shoes and glasses.

Genocide can also be evoked in the already extinguished eyes of a person who is about to die and whom we know knows it, or in the unbearably candid gaze of a child whom we know doesn't know it. But genocide can also be found in emptiness, in apparent nothingness, for that is its purpose: annihilation. This abomination is then photographed as an indentation, its victims immortalized in absentia. This is the path Michel Slomka chose.

The 38-year-old photographer first visited Birkenau in December 2011. A magazine had sent him to report on overtourism at this sacred site. It was a screw-up! No one was there. There were only ghosts, including that of his great-grandfather, whom he discreetly refers to as S. A Jewish emigrant who had made the journey from Poland to Ménilmontant in the 1920s, S was on convoy 36, which left Drancy on September 23, 1942, bound for the extermination camp. He vanished into the mist that the photographer's lens was trying to pierce.

'Disappearance is never absolute'

On site, Slomka followed the visitor's itinerary. But alongside the heaps of objects, he also photographed fragments scattered on the ground, small pieces of life that told him just as much. Then, as night fell on a bitterly cold day, he also deliberately strayed to crematorium number 5, a little way off the memorial circuit. He surprised (as much as he was surprised by) a deer. The animal fled into the nearby woods. This was an invitation to follow it, off the beaten track of memory. The photographer remembered that.

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