The City Daily Photo Blogs monthly theme is feet. This photo was taken a while back in the visitor center of the Dachau concentration camp just outside of Munich, Germany. It’s a sobering exhibit showing the evil side of humanity. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

Also Monochrome Monday has gotten past it’s Mr. Linky issues, so I’m back with this week’s submission. Check here for more monochrome photos.

The Dachau visitor’s center is about a block long, spanning the camp from one side to the other. Loosely divided into sections, each section has storyboards narrating some aspect of the camp’s history, ranging from the daily routine to the medical care (or lack of it) the internees received.

Don’t know what this women was reading, but the look on her face and posture speaks volumes.

You may notice the technical quality of these photos isn’t that good. Now of course supposedly it’s not the camera that matters, and in a sense that’s true. But with a prosumer camera like a Canon Xti with it’s cropped sensor, you’re ISO limited compared to full frame sensors. In indoor situations like this you find yourself shooting at 1/15 sec or somewhere in that range, even with my Xti at it’s highest ISO setting of 1600. So you end up with shaky, grainy, low depth of field photos.

Miserable weather seemed befitting during our visit to Dachau. Wet snow all day long, we were soaked walking around outside. This monument is to all that died at this concentration camp, under inhumane and many in macabre ways. The original administration building is now an expansive exhibit, with displays and storyboards throughout. There was tour after tour after tour of german high school students passing through the facility. I assume to make sure the past isn’t forgotten.

My colleagues seemed a bit shocked reading their way through the history. I wasn’t. I know it. Hitler didn’t suddenly rise out of nowhere. Nazism is something that developed over a couple of decades. Something to keep in mind. It’s insidious. It starts with vilifying sections of the population. Next you know they’re being rounded up.

I know it couldn’t happen again nowadays, not here anyway. A true democracy prevents that. But there has been so much horror in other parts of the planet in recent history it’s hard to fathom how the rest of the world could just do next to nothing. Sierra Leone comes to mind.