There was first the Berlin period, 1979 to 1989, a city that interested me as both cultural symbol, the spirit of Weimar, the Bauhaus, Expressionism, and political one, the humiliating 1918 defeat, the crushed Spartacist revolution, the Nazis' rise to power and, above all, the decision for the Final Solution at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, then the Wall built from 1961 to 1989 to symbolise the Cold War. After these ten years I was curious to discover Germany's eastern face, to see how the Weimar Republic's spirit could coexist with Buchenwald, to cross a rurality almost unchanged since 1933; in 1992, after a year of photography, Polish territory appeared to me, like East Germany, far behind in economic, technological, urban and rural development, a landscape from another time that greatly eased the pursuit of my work on memory, of which Auschwitz-Birkenau remained the essential point. Winner of a Special Mention at the 2000 Prix Nadar.