The film stills of Nazis that the New York-based polish artist Piotr Uklanski collected for this book show men with imperious, brutish, and menacing gazes or cynical and tortured smiles. They all wear uniforms adorned with swastikas, imperial eagles, and skulls. Some wear monocles or black eye patches.
It’s about the power of costumes and the costumes of power. It’s about the glamour of evil, the glistening shine of fake medals of honor made of fake gold. It’s not about Nazis, but about Hollywood Nazis and their poses of evil, their stagy cynical glances from deep blue eyes, their dramatic facial expressions, and their highly decorative emblems of cruelty. It’s about the power of media representations that have substantially shaped and distorted our collective idea of historic evil.