Shimon Attie

Concerned with questions of memory, place, and identity, Shimon Attie gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by introducing histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. The Writing on the Wall project (1991-1993) took place in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. There Attie projected slides made from pre-Holocaust photographs of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and shops in the same (or sometimes nearby) locations where the original images were taken. He then photographed the resulting scene. A woman from the past looks out the window of a building now scrawled with graffiti. A pigeon shop with cages stacked on the sidewalk is restored to an otherwise empty street. The life and industry suggested in the projections of the past strike an unexpected counterpoint to the crumbling facades and apparently abandoned places of the present. (from: Museum of Contemporary Photography web page at: <a class=”aligncenter”

href=”http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php”>http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php

References: 

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2004/05/shimon_attie_th.php

Attie, Shimon. Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs. Burlington, VT: Verve, 1998.

Attie, Shimon, and Christopher Beaver. Between Dreams and History: The Making of Shimon Attie’s Public Art Projects(videorecording). Ben Lomond, CA: distributed by The Video Project, 2000 .

Attie, Shimon, Natasha Egan, and Alexander Stille. The History of Another. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2004.

Attie, Shimon, et al. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994.

Mikael Levin, “War Story”

“In 1944-45 an American war correspondent, Meyer Levin embarked on a journey through Europe. His assignment was to seek out the remnants of Jewish communities, to cover the “Jewish story”. Sharing a Jeep with him was French photographer Eric Schwab. Schwab was photographing the war. He was also on a personal mission, searching for his mother who had been deported in 1943. In his autobiography, In Search, Meyer Levin describes that journey from Paris to Prague, through the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the first stirrings of the Cold War. In the fall of 1995 Mikael Levin retraced his father’s journey. He photographed the concentration camps and the Europe of today, contrasting his journey to his father’s experiences of fifty years ago. Mikael Levin has assembled those photographs together with his father’s writings and with a selection of Eric Schwab’s photographs from 1945, creating a narrative of images and text that span fifty years and two generations.” (from artist’s web page, online at: <a class=”aligncenter”

www.mikaellevin.com

 

Christian Boltanski

Reserve (Réserve), 1990

”

Boltanski started using a new raw material, clothes, in 1988. They first appeared in a poignant piece, Réserve, Canada. This work echoes the warehouses that Nazis used to store the belongings of the deported. Boltanski, in other words, associated clothes with death from the outset (as he had with photography). In his words, “Someone’s photograph, garment or dead body are pretty much the same thing: there was someone there, now they’re gone.” Garments are also vestiges or marks that bear testimony to a life now past.

That is what clothes meant in the string of Réserves that followed. They are all installations that play on the subject of death and memory. In his 1989 Réserve: la Fête de Pourim (Purim Holiday) and 1990 Réserve: Lac des morts (Lake of the Dead), the clothes lay on the floor. In his 1989 Réserve du Musée des enfants (Children’s Museum), he stacked them in rows (1).

For his 1990 Réserve, he lined the walls of a whole room in loft-smelling hand-me-down clothes. Because this work’s overbearing presence is not just visual: it is also olfactory – a dimension that plastic art does not use enough (2).
Much like the other works in this series, the atmosphere that the 1990 Réserve creates is a door to melancholic contemplation of the body as a brittle vessel, vanity and death (all of which ranked among Boltanski’s favourite themes in the 1990s).” (from Centre Pompidou catalogue, online at: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-boltanski_en/ENS-boltanski_en.htm

Autel de Lycée Chases (1987)

Christian BOLTANSKI, born in 1944 in Paris, has produced many works combining a variety of materials on the traditional theme in Western art of human transience as represented in vanitas. Starting his career as a motion picture maker, he began in 1985 a series called “Monuments” using portraits of children. 
Autel de Lycée Chases represents the extension of that series, with portraits of Jewish students enrolled in high school in Vienna in 1931 arranged in the shape of an altar softly illuminated by light bulbs. While this is all the information about the students provided by the artist and there is no overt reference to the Holocaust that the students would suffer in ensuing years, the scene nevertheless hints at the transience of human existence.

Alfredo Jaar, “Let there be light: the Rwanda project 1994-1998″

http://imaginarymuseum.org/MHV/PZImhv/JaarRwandaProject.html

“Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project 1994-98 inspired a host of difficult and contradictory reactions. His subject is, as always, politically, socially and morally enormous. He deals with the systematic murder of Tutsi men, women and children by the Hutu death squads in the spring of 1994. In August of that year, Jaar went to Rwanda to see for himself what had happened, and took thousands of photographs. As testament and memorial, he focused on the survivors. In this presentation he singled out one in particular, Gutete Emerita, a young woman who witnessed the killing of her husband and two sons and who, with her daughter, miraculously escaped, hiding in a swamp for three weeks.” (Lilly Wei, Art in America, Dec, 1998)

The Rwanda Project attempts to counter and transform the conventions of photojournalism, which frequently objectifies violence through unmediated images of victimization. Alternatively, Jaar reverses the lens’ eye to focus on the eyes of the witnesses and the hauntingly beautiful landscape in which this massacre was enacted as a means of eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.

References:

http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/research/WtoS/Sever2.pdfhttp://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/08spring/chow.shtm

Tuol Sleng victim headshots

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Mr. Nhem En’s career in the Khmer Rouge began in 1970 at age 9 when he was recruited as a village boy to be a drummer in a touring revolutionary band. When he was 16, he said, he was sent to China for a seven-month course in photography. After this he became the chief of six photographers at Pol Pot’s secret prison S-21. He is the author of most of the pictures, that now hang in rows at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Phnom Penh. The eyes of the victims in the pictures, so painfully directed at us are in fact pointed towards Mr. Nhem En, who in a New York Times interview, said: 

They came in blindfolded, and I had to untie the cloth. I was alone in the room, so I am the one they saw. They would say: Why was I brought here? What am I accused of? What did I do wrong? ‘Look straight ahead. Don’t lean your head to the left or the right.’ That’s all I said. I had to say that so the picture would turn out well. Then they were taken to the interrogation center. The duty of the photographer was just to take the picture.’ (Seth Mydans, “Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House”)

THE EXHIBITION (MoMA)

From May 15 to September 30, 1997, a selection of 22 headshot pictures from Tuol Sleng was displayed as “Photographs from S21: 1975-1979″, at MoMA, New York. The exhibition was organized by two American photographers, Chris Riley and Doug Niven, who discovered 6,000 original 6 x 6 cm negatives in a cabinet in Tuol Sleng and copyrighted possession of 100 of them. By exposing the pictures on the walls of an influential art museum, the pictures became disconnected from their history and what more important from their ability to animate the tragedy of those they depict. They turned into anonymous artifacts, aesthetically satisfying and emotionally powerful but lacking there function as traces of both their referents (victims) and the Cambodian Genocide. Only 22 pictures were exhibited, who did the selection? And what where the criteria? Todd Gitlin has compared the prospect of selecting which images to print and display to having to decide who was going to live or die – yet it is unclear if Gitlin means that those displayed have been saved. Instead, our looking at them may condemn them to a new death every time, since they are allowed to stand for nothing else. The photographs were largely presented as fine art, Riley and Niven also made several sets of art-quality prints for sale to collectors. One reviewer praised the photographer (who somehow unknown to MoMA at the time, was Nhem En) and compared him to Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, writing that, “these starkly powerful photographs are as complex and human as any series of portraits.” A grand statement if not for the fact that they do not symbolize human tragedy but are proof of it. We must not forget that as much as they are images even beautiful ones, they foremost torture devices and testimonials of pain and atrocities.

 

References:

S. Mydans, “Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House”, online at:

 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E1DA1231F934A15753C1A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

D. Hawk, The Photographic Record, in: K. Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death, Princeton Univeristy Press, 1989.

T. Roma, Looking Into the Face of Our Own Worst Fears Through Photography in: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 44.10 (1997)