Locations Pyrénées-Orientales, Portbou, Banyuls-sur-Mer, Cerbère

'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 that retraces the final journey of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Fleeing Nazism in 1940, Benjamin was denied entry into Spain. Faced with the prospect of extradition following his detention by the Vichy regime, Benjamin chose to end his own life in the Spanish Border Town of Portbou.

The impetus of the work lies in a response to the anxiety surrounding increased global conflicts and far-right gains worldwide. Spurred by Emmanuel Macron's panic elections and a surge in the far-right following the 2024 European Elections, McQuillan-Byrne made the trip to the Pyrenees. Remains of faded election posters can be seen throughout the work, a testament to the hard-fought left-wing campaign fought by 'La Nouveau Front Populaire' in 2024. The photographs in this project were made along and adjacent to 'The Walter Benjamin Trail', a refugee route established by anti-fascist freedom fighters in the early years of the war. The paths they forged across the Pyrenees still act as channels for contemporary refugees looking to make a life in '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 Port-Bou are heavily policed, with refugees regularly rejected. The border and its infrastructure are disused. These locations instead serve as spaces in which history can now be read. By imaging these locations, the work identifies what Benjamin calls 'the optical unconscious', a process in which the camera reveals truths about the world of which we were previously only dimly aware. In locating and examining the signs, symbols and images at the periphery of our consciousness head-on, 'Anticipating the Butcher' champions an optical consciousness that can locate the warning signs evident in the landscape.

In conjunction with 'the optical unconscious', the form of the book activates Benjamin's theory of the "constellation" as a way of seeing and knowing. The image of the constellation is depicted in the ceiling of the disused Port-Bou customs hall, a night sky-come-disassembled EU flag, which repeats throughout the work. The book draws together photographs, ephemera and text into a specific orbit to visualise a Europe that finds itself in disarray in the face of a return to its troubled past. September 2025 will mark 85 years since Benjamin made the journey.