‘Anticipating the Butcher’ (2024) is a documentary photography project that retraces the final journey of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935). Fleeing Nazism in 1940, Benjamin was denied entry at the Spanish border. Faced with the prospect of extradition back into the hands of the Gestapo, Benjamin chose to end his own life in the Spanish border town of Portbou.

The project looks to articulate anxieties around the political climate in Europe and the UK, and the sinking feeling that politically things are returning to the extreme polarisations of the 1930s. In trying to make sense of this, McQuillan-Byrne turned to Benjamin's writings from the time.  Following a surge in support for the far right in the 2024 European Elections, Emmanuel Macron called a snap election. Remains of faded election posters can be seen throughout the work, as a result of the hard-fought popular front campaign fought by 'La Nouveau Front Populaire'. Upon learning that the towns surrounding the political refugee routes, which had once been used to save hundreds of refugees from Nazism, had voted again for the far-right National Rally, McQuillan-Byrne made the trip to the Pyrenees.

The photographs in this project were made along the “Chemin Walter Benjamin (Walter Benjamin Trail)”, a refugee route established by anti-fascist freedom fighter Lisa Fittko in the 1940s. These paths forged across the Pyrenees still act as channels for contemporary refugees looking to make a life in what many call "Fortress Europe". 'Anticipating the Butcher’ unfolds across a border that, for those within the EU, no longer exists. In reality, the train lines that come into Portbou are heavily policed, with refugees regularly ejected.

As a result of the Schengen Zone, the border and its infrastructure are now disused. These locations instead serve as spaces in which history can now be read. By photographing these locations, the work identifies what Benjamin called ‘the optical unconscious’, a process in which the camera reveals that of which we were previously only dimly aware. In locating a range of political and historical echoes, symbols and warning signs head-on, 'Anticipating the Butcher' looks to image a landscape that is struggling with a return to its troubled past. The name of the work is lifted from a Poem by Bertold Brecht that similarly tells the story of Walter Benjamin's failed attempt to escape fascism.

_

A copy of the photobook is currently held in the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin.