Brian Griffin's haunting new photography book documents paths that led to the Holocaust

Subdued, disquieting and ultimately devastating, Brian Griffin’s photography series Himmselstrasse forms a solemn documentation of the Nazi Holocaust. The Birmingham-born photographer’s monochrome images depict the Polish railways tracks that carried around three million people to Nazi WWII extermination camps, and the haunting silence and desolateness in them is profound. The title of the series is taken from “a cynical Nazi joke used to describe the final journey to the gas chambers,” and translates as Heaven Street. A stark reminder of the barbarity of the Holocaust, the images have been drawn together in a book published and designed by Browns Editions that reflects the tragedy’s perpetrators, taking its typography from the Blackletter favoured by the Nazi Party and its colourways from the red and black of its insignia. Himmelstrasse launches at the Photographers’ Gallery in London tomorrow.