Anticipating The Butcher

'Anticipating the Butcher' (2024) looks to retrace the final journey made by Walter Benjamin through the Pyrenees, fleeing Nazism in 1940. The project documents the aftermath of recent French Elections, contemporary refugee routes and Benjamin's ideas.

Anticipating the Butcher (2024) is a documentary photography project by Oscar McQuillan-Byrne retracing the final journey of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. In September 1940, fleeing Nazism, Benjamin reached the Spanish border town of Portbou. Refused entry and facing extradition to Nazi Germany, he chose to end his life.

The project emerges from a response to mounting global conflict and the resurgence of the far-right across Europe. Prompted by Emmanuel Macron’s snap elections and the far-right surge in the 2024 European Parliament vote, McQuillan-Byrne followed the Pyrenean route once carved by anti-fascist resistance fighters like Lisa Fitko. Today, this route is known as “the Walter Benjamin Trail”; now a popular hiking destination, these paths remain active channels for contemporary refugees attempting to cross into “Fortress Europe.”

Anticipating the Butcher unfolds across a border that, in theory, no longer exists. For EU citizens, the line is invisible, yet the train lines leading into Portbou remain heavily policed by border control officers, and refugees are routinely turned back. In photographing this disused border infrastructure, these locations act as sites in which history can now be read. The photographs in this project look to highlight what Benjamin called “the optical unconscious”: the capacity of the camera to reveal latent truths in the everyday world, things we may only dimly apprehend until they are fixed in the frame. By turning directly to the signs, symbols, and marginal images of the borderlands, the project insists on an “optical consciousness” capable of registering the warning signals inscribed in the landscape itself.

Formally, the photobook looks to enact Benjamin’s theory of the constellation—a mode of seeing that assembles fragments into a pattern of historical meaning. The motif of the constellation recurs in the disused Portbou customs hall, its ceiling resembling a night sky or a dismembered European flag. Photographs, found ephemera, and text orbit one another within the photobook, forming a fractured vision of a destabilised Europe struggling with the return of its troubled past.

September 2025 marks 85 years since Benjamin’s final journey. Anticipating the Butcher confronts this anniversary by bringing into focus the fragile line between past catastrophe and the urgencies of today.