Yolocaust: Is It Appropriate to Take Selfies at a Place of Memory

Shahak Shapira is a German Jew. He left Tel Aviv at the age of 14. For many years, he observed how a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, visited by over 10,000 people daily, becomes a background for tourist photographs. And many of them smile, juggle objects, show acrobatic tricks, and after that publish the photographs on social networks, with captions such as ‘jumping on dead Jews’, ‘what an incredible place’, or ‘pose — no problem’.

Yolocaust project is Shapira’s answer to the behavior of the visitors of the memorial that he thinks is inappropriate. He combined tourists’ selfies with archive photographs from German concentration camps. As a result, the juggler ends up in a mass grave, and two men are jumping not over the blocks of concrete, but over a pile of dead bodies.

“It wouldn’t have been so bad if the selfies were good. But the poses they are striking are not appropriate. Would you do yoga in a cemetery?” Shahak says in one of the interviews.

If after seeing the collages anyone would feel ashamed about their photographs, the author promises to delete them from the project.