French Literature Reviews - 2026
C. Cognet, Éclats. Clandestine Photography of the Nazi Camps
Art and Visual Culture
Éclats.
Prises de vue clandestines des camps nazis
Christophe Cognet
Seuil
Publication date 05/09/2019
25.00 € incl. tax
432 pages
EAN 9782021377927
Drawing on a largely unpublished corpus, Christophe Cognet investigates the clandestine photographs taken in Nazi camps, viewing them as extraordinary acts of resistance.
For over fifteen years, the author has pursued a cinematic exploration of the images captured secretly—and at the peril of their lives—by the deportees themselves within the Nazi camps. Following his 2014 theatrical release Parce que j’étais peintre, dedicated to camp drawings and watercolors, he turned to another film project, À pas aveugles, which engages with these very photographs: at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora, and Ravensbrück, inmates successfully managed to take clandestine snapshots.
The book Éclats—meaning splinters or shards—grows out of both this film project and a long-standing engagement with these clandestine images. It chronicles the journey of a gaze by offering nuanced analyses of these photographs, each scrutinized at length and recontextualized. The aim is to resume the investigation—and at times initiate it—using contemporary knowledge, without dogmatic theorization yet mindful of theoretical frameworks, and without preconceived notions of what these images have to show and tell us. This work is at once a historical exploration, a reflection on the expressive capacities of photography, and a tribute to its creators, restoring them to the center and origin of their imagery. Thus, the book aims to reconstruct the precise narrative of their actions and the scenes captured, while also sketching portraits—whenever possible—both of the photographers, women and men alike, and of those depicted within the frames.
Christophe Cognet is a film director and screenwriter.
The study of visual culture produced under duress often involves examining how images bear witness to extreme historical trauma. Within the broader field of Holocaust studies and the analysis of wartime documentation, photographic records taken secretly by victims occupy a unique and harrowing position. Such artifacts require careful contextualization to understand the extreme peril under which they were created, as well as the deliberate intent of those who risked their lives to capture them. Scholars in this area frequently investigate the intersection between archival preservation, ethics, and the visual representation of mass violence.
Readers interested in the history of photography under totalitarian regimes, visual archives of World War II, and the documentation of resistance within concentration camps may find this work relevant. Christophe Cognet is a film director and screenwriter known for his cinematic exploration of art and images from the camps, having previously worked on a release dedicated to camp drawings and watercolors.