Real Nazis

Real Nazis sets Hollywood film stills of actors playing Nazi officers directly against archival photographs of the real Third Reich officials and war criminals they were cast to resemble, and lets the reader try to tell the two apart.

The book presents the images in sequence without captions separating fiction from documentary record, so the visual likeness between cinematic villainy and historical fact does the argument's work. It follows the design and production of Piotr Uklanski's 1999 book The Nazis, extending that project's interrogation of how popular film has rehearsed and aestheticized fascist imagery.

Uklanski is a Polish-born conceptual artist whose work regularly recycles found and appropriated imagery, from film stills to folk craft, to probe collective memory and taste. Real Nazis was published by Edition Patrick Frey, the Zurich imprint that has issued several of his photographic and book-based projects.