Wiesenthal Centre to Frankfurt Book Fair Director: “2007 Fair Opens as Homage to Catalonia in the Language of Holocaust Denial”

“The letter pointed to a catalogue of the Fair, entitled “Guest of Honour Frankfurt Book Fair 2007: Cultura Catalana Singular i Universal” which, “among its list of activities, presents the exhibit ‘NOU-NOW. Contemporary Catalan Photography’ showing at the Fotografie Forum Internationa. The photo selected to represent the exhibit in this catalogue (page 15, [1]) is ‘El Mur’ (The Wall) of Joan Fontcuberta, featuring an Arab man in ‘keffiyeh’ headscarf facing the separation barrier between Israel and the West Bank.”
The Centre clarified, “What makes this photo (3.25 ft x 5 ft in dimension) an unmitigated outrage is the substance of its caption: ‘The Wall in the Palestinian West Bank. The picture is a mosaic of images from a Google search. Ten thousand photos from the Internet searched for Nazi concentration camps (Search key words include “labor camp”, “Auschwitz-Birkenau”, “Belzec”, “Bergen-Belsen”).’ These apparently compose the pixels that comprise Fontcuberta’s photo - a smug exercise in banalizing the horrors of the Holocaust, an offense to the memory of its victims and to the pain of its survivors, Jews and others - including Catalan fugitives from Franco’s Fascism.”