Heimrad Bäcker

The photographer and poet Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) dedicated his life to documenting the remnants of Nazism and the Holocaust. Bäcker’s photographs look away from the scenes usually associated with the Shoah—barracks, gates, train tracks—and focus on the minute and incidental traces left behind in the Austrian landscape: indentations in stone, twisted steel rods, and concrete foundations. His examination of Austrian history is also a self-critical reflection on his enthusiastic participation, as a teenager, in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Landscape M focuses on Bäcker’s works related to Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria. MCA Denver’s exhibition is the first of Bäcker’s work in the US, and it is the first to show the body of work left behind after his death.