First edition of Hotel of Eternal Light by Karolina Spolniewski (2024)

First impression 

Large format hardback in new condition 

Signed and numbered by Karolina Spolniewski

In a limited edition of 600 copies 

Text in English and German

About

We associate light with hope, redemption and salvation. For us, light is an announcement of something new and good. But what if it had a completely opposite meaning? If it were to be used to deprive us of any hope, would it serve to subordinate one person to another, to take over one’s thoughts, to permanent surveillance?

Hotel of Eternal Light is a visual investigation of dictatorships and totalitarian systems in the recent history of Europe. Using an example of the abuse of power by the Stasi, the secret political police of the former communist German Democratic Republic, the book focuses on the use of light as a form of control, torture and communication code.

Photos for the book were taken in the former secret Stasi prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Not knowing where they were being held, its former prisoners described it as the Hotel of Eternal Light, where constant artificial lighting was a tool to suspend time and annihilate their inner selves. To break the psyche of prisoners, various methods of white torture and light were used, from X-rays, through light corridors, flashing lights, blinding, to black isolation. As Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, such a radical experience in isolation and loneliness leaves us unable to experience the world, unable to make sense of reality, unable to trust our own sense of the self.