Holocaust Archives - Page 3 of 4

Dark Tourism Conference II

February 29, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Having thought about the ideas raised after my visit to St. John’s College, I decided to try the idea out in my studio space at Brookes. I began by copying the entry on St. John’s College from the Encyclopaedia of Oxford which, using a water-based marker I then wrote out (in part) onto one of the windows. The windows are not the right shape for the project but I got a good idea of how it would look nevertheless.

Having used the text of the history of St. John’s I decided to write on another window, all that I could see as I looked through the glass, and, having done this, I considered the significance of the two.
The text delineates the surface of the glass and so defines it more readily as a barrier; the text itself is not a physical barrier but rather a conscious one. One is able to shift one’s focus from one to the other but can never see them at the same time – at least not clearly. With regards the text describing the scene beyond the window I found that this created an interesting, temporal exchange. Looking through the text one can see the world as it is ‘now’, whereas when reading the text one can only see the world (albeit in words) as it was. You have to read/view one or the other – you can’t do both.

Reading the text traps the viewer for a moment in the past and obscures the reality of the world. It follows therefore that seeing the world as it is outside hides the past. Reading the text describing the scene outside as the text was written, one can flit between past and present but can see by doing so how some things remain the same. A building for example described in the text might well be the same as when viewed through the glass, whereas someone who was walking beyond the glass when the text was written will exist in words but will not be visible to the viewer when looking (reading) between lines. Of course it might be that words used to describe a person in a somewhat vague fashion in the text may be applicable to someone beyond the glass when the viewer’s focus is shifted; for me, this is a good way to represent the continuity of life and also acts as a warning that the past can always repeat itself.

How does this work resolve with the issue of Dark Tourism? Let’s assume we are in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As tourists we are exposed to a place of trauma; we constantly flit between the past (that of which we’ve read in testimonies or seen in films and photographs) and the present (the reality of the world around us). Often we cannot make a connection between the two. We may well have read about one million dead but standing where we stand in the present, we simply cannot imagine it. However, when we do see something that fits the ‘text’ and the world around us, when we find a correlation (such as the gate tower), the past with all its trauma is brought into the present and vice-versa; there is in effect an exchange. But of course we are always safe behind the barrier; the barbed-wire-text fence doesn’t keep us in, but keeps the past at bay.

So why do we visit places of trauma? Perhaps it’s because we can always leave, we can move between past and present, yet know that we can always go home. Perhaps that’s why we go to places such as Auschwitz; because we know we can leave – leave with our existence all the brighter because of it, framed by the shadow of the past.

In the end, words (whether describing the experience of a tourist or a victim) can only take us so far. As Elie Wiesel wrote: ‘I would bring the viewer closer to the gate but not inside, because he can’t go inside, but that’s close enough.’ We can walk up to the ‘barbed-wire’ (text) fence, we can see the wires (read the text) and see through them, but we can never go any closer – not would we want to; that is, as Wiesel says, ‘close enough.’

Dreamcatcher VII

February 25, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

On my way to Luxembourg, I considered the pile of string and went over what I’d previously written, that the lines equate to hair, memories of the individual, individuals themselves, written words, unspoken words. The dreamcatcher, I summarised, is the attempt of the tourist to piece together a moment from the mass of dead light. It is the attempt to imagine what victims might have written /thought at the time (unwritten words) and maybe in the future; it is the attempt to piece together unsung melodies (music) and, to some extent, unsaid words (wires). But how do I help people make that connection?

Could I use postcards, manuscript paper, writing paper?

Having drawn the above (right-hand side) I was reminded of the wall of broken/displaced gravestones myself and Monika saw in Kazimierz-Dolny.

If I use postcards, manuscript paper, writing paper and so on (put on the wall behind the pile of string) would it be best to rip them and attempt to put them back together in the manner of the wall?

Dreamcatcher VI

February 21, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

I spent a couple of hours in the studio this afternoon cutting up the string which will go on the floor beneath the net of the dreamcatcher. Quite a bit of the string (which was dyed in balls) had remained relatively untocuhed by the dye, yet all the same, this gave the pile of string an interesting appearance. Of course there is no getting away from the fact that the pile alludes to the mountain of human hair which one can see in the museum at Auschwitz, but as I cut more of the string, I saw the string not so much as hair as unwritten words. The fact that some of it was white, ‘uninked’ as it were made me think of words that had been written and then erased. The way the dye has taken to some of the string has also given it the appearance of wire, and again this added to the idea of things left unwritten, but in this instance, things left unsaid, as if the wires were phone wires.

If this pile of string is to allude to things never said and never-written then the dreamcatcher becomes an attempt by the tourist (the viewer) to imagine what they (the victims) might have said and might have written. But like the dreamcatcher as something of an appropriated cultural symbol, the net of words and ‘voices’ are also appropriated from a decimated culture and can in no way tell us what it was really like to be there. Dreamcatchers let the good dreams through and ensnare the nightmares; we can never know what it was like to be there, and we will always pass through.

The question is, how do I enable the viewer to understand the string as unwritten words?

Hansel and Gretel

February 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Having worked on the Dreamcatcher installation, I have started researching another idea based on one centred around the story of Hansel and Gretel. This idea which is in itself a story, has become an installation through my working on the Dreamcatcher, in particular through the papering of drawings onto the walls. To me these drawings when pasted onto the walls reminded me of a child’s bedroom and this subsequently tied in with the idea of the fairytale. I thought if I reworked the drawings and drew them with coloured pencils, the overall effect might be more powerful.

Dreamcatcher V

February 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Due to the fact that my original idea for the MAO exhibition has had to be changed (instead of a whole room for the work I have now been allocated a corner) I have had to rethink the idea in relation to this new and smaller space. Clearly the original idea – which was to have given the impression of someone obsessed, with all four walls wallpapered with drawings – won’t work in just a corner. Far from being an installation, the work would become little more than a collection of drawings on the wall. Therefore I have had to rethink the piece which I’ve done by concentrating on the Dreamcatcher part of it, focussing on what a Dreamcatcher is in modern, contemporary culture. Of course changing the piece means changing the catalogue entry:

“While originating with Native American Indians, the Dreamcatcher today is more likely thought of as a negative symbol of cultural appropriation – little more than a trinket for the tourist derived from a decimated culture. Traditionally, they were said to let good dreams through whilst ensnaring nightmares and have become a part of my work through consideration of my role as a so-called ‘Dark Tourist,’ visiting – through my studies – sites such as Auschwitz. Death is described by the pieces of string – the thread of life drawn, measured and cut; each one tied to make the Dreamcatcher. We, like the good dreams can always pass through.”

I am currently negotiating the possibility of a show at a conference on ‘Dark Tourism’ in April this year and so this new angle on the work has intrigued me. It remains to be seen whether this will be accepted by the curators of the Brookes MAO show, but if not, it’s certainly something I can continue to explore and show elsewhere.

Berlin – City of Voids

February 4, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Berlin is a place I’ve wanted to visit for some time now, but one which, despite its history, remains quite unfamiliar to me. It is of course, a city synonymous with 20th century conflict, both through its partioning in the Cold War and as the place from which the Nazis directed years of murder and terror throughout Europe, and yet, despite this, it’s always stood somehow on the periphery of all that I know. Of course, that might just have been because I’d never been there, and yet, even after visiting, the true character of Berlin remains something of an enigma.

My knowledge of the city was pretty much limited to the Cold War divide, to the fall of the wall in 1989, and the tyrannical rule of the Nazis. I had also recently read something about the city in Andreas Huyssen’s book, ‘Present Pasts – Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’ in which, in a few chapters he discusses the renewal of Berlin in the wake of the collapse of communism. His view of the regeneration of the city is one that is rather pessimistic. He writes that ‘many of the major construction projects seem to have been designed against the city rather than for it. Some of them look like corporate spaceships reminiscent of the conclusion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The trouble is, they’re here to stay.’

It’s striking that after being destroyed by Allied bombs and an ideological schism which took the world to the brink of a third world war, one regrets (at least Huyssen does) the permanence of its new structures. But I understand how he feels. Berlin is an ugly city.

In his beautifully evocative work Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald writes:

“At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct the outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence in ruins.”

Look at the great stone buildings in any city and one can see exactly what is meant in this passage. And yet, in present day Berlin, there are few new buildings which one could imagine as a ruin. They are constructs of glass and steel, they would melt rather than fall, or shatter into millions of pieces. They cast no shadow – the sun passes through them as it does through high clouds in summer. They might one day burn away, but not through cataclysm or catastrophe, but simply through the fact that no-one will bother to look anymore. One’s eyes already find their way through to the other side.
Huyssen continues the passage above; ‘The void in the centre of Berlin will have been filled [he was writing in 1997]. But the memories of that haunting space from the months and years after the Wall came down will linger.’

In Berlin, history seems to creep up on you. Such is the level of trauma suffered by the city, it seems at first to forget itself, to be unaware of its own name. The visitor just arrived might walk its streets but they seem somehow unconnected, like individual roads recalled from other destinations. One walks but doesn’t have the feeling of going anywhere (something in part due to the lack on any particular centre). And yet, the more one questions the city with feet and roving eyes, the more the city begins to recall. At first it might remember just the names of its streets, those which are unconnected, as if a map of the city had been torn to pieces and its names read in fragments picked off the floor. It does not speak its memories aloud, but keeps quiet. There is I believe, a palpable sense of its history being a history of fear.

The Stasi, the infamous secret police of the GDR, have long since gone, but somehow one suspects that memory – which also in part seems to have been dismantled – has nonetheless its wiretaps, interrogation rooms and networks still intact. This decommissioned memory had long listened in on those who walked the streets, who sat in cafés, pored over maps and slept in hotel bedrooms, but now it is us that ask the questions, who attempt to listen. We can look upon its files, listen to the recordings made through its intricate devices. But everything seems disconnected. Memories seem fractured, just like the city itself. There is a caesura which exists between the past and the present, as if the wall, demolished in the city has somehow been rebuilt between them, as if the wide expanse of no-man’s land separates today from all that has gone before. And all these buildings built upon it do nothing to bridge this gap.
According to Huyssen, ‘the one architect who understood the nature of this empty space in the centre of Berlin was Daniel Liebskind, who, in 1992, made the following proposal.

“Rilke once said that everything is already there. We only must see it and protect it. We must develop a feel for places, streets, and houses which need our support. Take the open area at the Potsdamer Platz. I suggest a wilderness, one kilometer long, within which everything can stay as it is. The street simply ends in the bushes. Wonderful. After all, this area is the result of today’s divine natural law: nobody wanted it, nobody planned it, and yet it is firmly implanted in all our minds. And there in our minds, this image of the Potsdamer Platz void will remain for decades. Something like that cannot be easily erased, even if the whole area will be developed.”‘

As I said, I had little conception of what to expect of Berlin, but Potsdamer Platz has now been developed and in a sense Liebskind’s statement is true. The void cannot easily be erased and even though the area has been built upon, the buildings still convey a sense of emptiness. Perhaps memory should remain quiet despite our questions, perhaps through saying nothing it conveys much more than it ever could through words. Perhaps the city’s new buildings have been designed this way on purpose?
One building which cannot be said to be like any of those I’ve described (in general terms) above (at least in its exterior appearance), is the Jewish Museum (Judisches Museum) designed by Daniel Liebskind.

If ever there was a compliment to the spaces and voids which still exist in the physical aspect of the city, it is the history of the country’s Jewish population and Liebskind’s building – if not all its contents – allude starkly to that tragedy. It is a dark and foreboding structure which has no visible entrance (it is accessed through the adjacent Berlin Museum), and once inside, this sense of foreboding is conveyed through its corridors or, as they’re known – axis. What intrigued me most however as we made our way through the building, into the Holocaust Tower (itself a brilliantly evocative installation), back out and up to one of the building’s ‘voids'(home to an installation by Menashe Kadishman’s ‘Shalechet’) was how this building was not just housing an exhibition/display, but was itself an integral part of the story.

In fact, as far as I was concerned, this building needed no contents; it is perhpas worthwhile stating that before the contents of the exhibitions were installed, 300,000 people came to visit the building anyway.
Huyssen states that the ‘…building has become a script. His building itself writes the discontinuous narrative that is Berlin, inscribes it physically into the very movement of the museum visitor and yet opens a space for remembrance to be articulated and read between the lines.” I would not disagree with any of this, however, I would say, that the exhibition itself hampers this overall effect. There is just too much information, too much too see, it is at odds with the building in terms of the style in which it is presented. The question is I think, ‘is this building a museum or a memorial?’ At the moment it doesn’t seem to know.

Something which knows exactly what it is, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Of course there is controversy (one of many surrounding the project) as to why this memorial is only dedicated to one of the many groups persecuted by the Nazis, however, I do not wish to go into this matter here. What is worth looking at is the memorial above ground and its counterpart museum space below. When I first saw the memorial I must admit to feeling – despite its size – a little under-whelmed. I can’t say why, but it seemed a little messy somehow, a tad haphazard. Of course it is neither of these things but that is the impression it gave. However, when entering the memorial, this feeling changes, and in a sense that is part of its success. It pulls you in, it’s not something which can simply be observed and then left, it has to be experienced and understood.

There is no definite beginning to the memorial. On the outside the stones are like the slabs of an individual tomb, but as one walks past others towards an opposing side, one quickly becomes dwarfed by the huge blocks in the centre. This for me resonates with something in which I’m particularly interested; the opposing poles of the individual and mass. The stones themselves – those towards the centre – are like the tombs one finds in a necropolis. But they are not named, the individual has quickly become effaced. And even though there are hundreds of these massive blocks, one is never lost amongst them, one can always see the other side. There is no mystery to the monument, it does not have the mystery of a maze or a labyrinth. We will find our way out. We can see the other side whereas none of the victims in their nightmare could. We walked into it as easily as Europe walked into atrocity, but reason – the other side – should always see that we never become lost again.
The museum below takes the shapes of the stones above and uses them throughout its displays, which, unlike the displays in the Jewish Museum, are perfectly weighted. In fact the whole experience is neither too long or too short. It’s simple and utterly compelling. In particular, the displays of families, including snapshots of happier times are devastating.

And the room in which the names of individuals are displayed and a short biography read out is measured and particularly poignant. When one finally leaves the museum and emerges back within the memorial, the stones take on further meanings; each becomes a family group, reduced to nothing but a void realized in stone. Other people visiting the memorial appear ahead, or to the side, fleetingly to then disappear again in a moment; all part of the monument’s design.

There were however other memorials dotted throughout the city, and perhaps the most poignant were those in Große Hamburger Straße. In the pavement, outside the former dwellings of Jews killed in the Holocaust, gold cobbles bearing the names of the victims and the location of their deaths have been installed. These simple, small yet visible monuments connect the person observing with the intimate lives of those who perished and in many ways reminded me of the plaques one finds on some of the schools in Paris. It is both as compelling and as heartbreaking to see the places from where people were taken, as it is to see the dreadful places they were taken to, and these cobbles are heartrending for that precise reason.

Also there was the work by artist Christian Boltanski, also on Große Hamburger Straße, ‘The Missing House’. This piece shows the names of residents on the walls of the houses either side which are of course still standing, and like the cobbles it’s poignant in how it links those who perished with dwellings which have also disappeared; another example of the city’s voids.

Flying over Berlin, on my way back home, looking at the the tens of thousands of streetlights and the lights of buildings glittering below, I couldn’t help but think of the fires which raged throughout the city in the second world war. Every light was like the memory of the flames; fires now confined within glass spheres and tubes. And in between the lights are the dark patches, the voids which have burned themselves out. Berlin is indeed a city of voids and no amount of building will hide them; but then, perhaps that is the point.

Dreamcatcher IV

January 27, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

In my latest session of work on the Dreamcatcher installation, I have started to add to those drawings already wallpapered to the wall. The drawings as they stand work well, but with the string aspect of the installation they need to become more like a single mass of lines rather than a collection of individual works. Therefore, I have started to draw directly on the walls, drawing large and small versions of the image. This for me leant itself neatly to the notion of an obsessive mind working on the question of how such a thing could have happened. Also, the constant drawing on a large scale (scale in terms of the physical space of the images rather than a single image itself) called to mind a mathematician working out a puzzle – trying to find an answer. There was also the action of the drawing itself; for the first time I found myself drawing with my eyes open, and yet, despite this the image of the gatetower produced was identical with that made when my eyes were closed; it seems there is no answer to be had, just an endless puzzle to be worked on.

There is also the sense as I am drawing of becoming trapped by the lines, of becoming imprisoned or ensnared by them; the more lines I make the less the chance of escape – the less chance of an answer.
The net of course which will hang in the centre of the piece is the ‘dreamcatcher’, something which lets the good dreams through and ensnares the nightmares and therefore there is this correlation between the two aspects of the piece.

I can easily imagine a piece of work in which this idea is explored – a performance piece in which standing before a large blackboard I make a series of chalk drawings as if I am trying to find an answer.
This I will explore in the coming weeks.

As things stand now, I need to start working on the string element of the piece. I have already worked on a ‘net-like’ piece using pieces of cut string (denoting both the lives of many individuals and an individual’s memories) and took a few pictures of the drawing through this net, just to start giving me a sense of the overall work.

Having discussed the idea above, I couldn’t help but invert one of the photographs to see how a blackboard version might appear. The outcome reminded me of an animation I made from the first drawings I ever did in this series which can be found by clicking here.

Dreamcatcher III

January 21, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Having completed one side and a corner of the installation ‘prototype’, pasting approximately 300 A4 drawings onto my studio walls, I believe that my initial concerns about the sizes of the individual drawings may be unfounded. In fact, as the walls have dried, and more images have been pasted on top of one another, the overall effect is as I’d first envisaged it.

Working in a corner has been important in this respect, as I can get a better impression of how the whole room will come together. The next stage will be adding in the string.

Forgetting

January 7, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Today I started work on my Dreamcatcher installation which will be installed in Modern Art Oxford in March 2008 as part of the Brookes Exhibition which runs for approximately nine days. Part of the installation comprises hundreds of drawings which I will wallpaper on the walls of a room, and in preparation for a trial version of the piece I created about 100 drawings this morning. And it was whilst making these drawings that I became aware of how, after a while, my hand seemed to be working quite independently of my mind. The lines of the drawing had come to form a pattern of sorts and my hand was simply going through the motions, churning out images not of the gate tower of Auschwitz-Birkenau per se, but rather drawings of drawings of the gate-tower of Auschwitz-Birkenau. My memory had become a pattern and although this did at first disconcert me, in the end I came to see it as something positive, insofar as my work on memory and memorials is concerned.

In his book ‘Present Pasts – Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory,’ Andreas Huyssen asks:

“Is it the fear of forgetting that triggers the desire to remember, or is it perhaps the other way around? Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?”

I would take this further and suggest that the overload of the memory system does not necessarily trigger a fear of forgetting, but rather it triggers forgetting itself. I was also reminded of Frances A. Yates’ book ‘The Art of Memory’ in which she discusses Socrates’ story of the invention of writing by the God Theuth.

“In the Phaedrus; Socrates tells the story of the God Theuth who invented numbers and arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, draughts and dice, and most importantly of all, letters. The king of all Egypt was the God Thamus who told Theuth that the invention of writing was not, as suggested, an elixir of memory and wisdom, but of reminding; the invention will produce forgetfulness.”

If one equates my line drawings with text, one can see how the re-remembering of the memory of Auschwitz-Birkenau through drawing has resulted (at least whilst making the drawings) in that memory being forgotten. What I’m actually remembering is not my visit, but a memory of that visit. And as such these drawings are somehow equivalent to post-memories; memories we might have of the Holocaust which of course we never experienced.

So what does this mean for the Dreamcatcher work?

The work itself is in part about how we can visit places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, safe in the knowledge that we can leave; just as we know we’ll always wake from our nightmares. Dreams and nightmares will eventually fade – they will be forgotten; they are unreal, much like our own post-memories of unwitnessed events.

So what is brought into question therefore is how best to remember atrocities such as Auschiwtz, the Holocaust and War in general?

Young Werther

December 7, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Whilst showing my tutor some of my research regarding photographs found in Auschwitz, she pointed out that on the reverse of one of them was a quote regarding Goethe.

The following photograph was taken in Bedzin in Poland in the 1930s.

The book from which this image was taken, states that it is a picture of: “Moniek Szwajcer (right) in front of the ruins in Bedzin. Dedicated possibly to Zygmunt Sztrochlic and Sabka Konińska.” And inscribed on the back in Polish were the words: “For my dear Zygmunt and lovely Sabka, in commemoration of beautiful years of work together at the school. From ‘Young Werther’, Moniek. Bedzin, 29 October 1937.

Young Werther refers to the book ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther,” by Goethe, which as a result of re-visiting this photograph, I have bought.

The Memory of the Mountain

December 6, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Having considered my recent findings as to the meaning behind the name Pantygasseg, I realised that a visit to the area in the next few weeks was essential. I knew I had to draw the outline of the mountain, it’s shape, perhaps on a large wall, but as I considered the line, I began to think of ways of expressing it. Could there be a way of expressing it sonically for example? Perhaps, yes, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about using material pertinent to the place itself, in this instance; coal.

My work is about mining the past, bringing the past to the surface, and coal is of course a product of the past (mined and brought to the surface). It’s a material composed of things which lived and which could be used to create, i.e. like charcoal – and could be used to draw the line of the mountain, or to be more precise, my memory of the line of the mountain. Coal is therefore a means of expressing my memory using the very substance of the mountain’s own; a means which also highlights the contrast between the human scale of time and History itself.

There’s also a contrast (with regards to my research on the Family Tree and my work on the Holocaust) between memory and forgetting, particularly when considering the metaphor of the ground as mind. The ground is mined, coal is extracted and the past is ‘remembered’. What the Nazis were hoping to accomplish, when they killed and buried hundreds of thousands in pits (at places such as Belzec) was, in a sense, to forget.

Dreamcatcher

November 14, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

In March 2008, Brookes will be showing a select number of works at MAO (Modern Art Oxford) and so I have decided to submit two proposals, one of which is entitled ‘Dreamcatcher’. The following extracts are taken from that proposal, the first section being ‘about me’ and the second ‘about the work’.

“As an artist, my main areas of interest are time, memory and remembering, with a particular emphasis on postmemory and its formation within the individual consciousness. Examining past events such as World War 1 and the Holocaust, my work seeks to explore how we formulate memories of times when we were not born, or of events to which we were not witness. What strategies do we employ in reconstructing the past? Contemporaneous objects, documents, photographs, verbal and written testimonies/narratives can all be used by the imagination to create postmemories, but what role do they play in the present-day, real-time, world?”

“An installation comprising a single room, all four walls of which are wallpapered with hundreds of drawings (see attached images for completed examples). These are drawings of the gate-tower at Auschwitz-Birkenau as remembered by myself following my visit there in October 2006. In the centre of the room, a net is suspended from the ceiling, created from hundreds of pieces of black string knotted together; a physical version of all the drawings, as if they were shown on a single piece of paper, and as if the ink had been turned into string.

The drawings themselves could be said to represent a last, snatched glance at the gate-tower of Birkenau and their number a testament to the number of people who died there. It could also be said to reveal my own incomprehension of standing in a place where over a million people died (a conflict between memory and postmemory), each death a piece of string – the thread of life drawn, measured and cut, as according to Greek Mythology – and tied to make the Dreamcatcher. Dreamcatchers are said to let good dreams through and ensnare nightmares, and for all the victims, Auschwitz-Birkenau was exactly that – a catastrophic nightmare.”

Today I started to create a prototype net at my studio and like all these things, it proved quite different in the way it began to develop off the page. Firstly, I tied a piece of string across my space about 7 feet off the ground and then attached vertical pieces which extended down to the floor. Almost straight away, I found myself thinking of a gallows.

When it came to tying the horizontal strings, I used the pile of cut strings which proved rather difficult to use, but I used them nevertheless, and the action of tying, again proved interesting albeit for very different reasons than before. Each knot felt just like an act of remembrance. It was a positive act rather than a negative one.

Having completed a number of the horizontal strings, a colleague in the studio told me that she thought it looked like a musical score of some kind. I was thinking that it looked like writing; but this idea of it being musical was interesting.

Colour

November 12, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Each string (in what I have so far called the ‘net’) represents in its ‘cut end’ the end of a path, the end of a life. Each string also represents a life entire as measured by the three fates. Furthermore they could be said, as a group to represent the combination of paths which, at a specific moment in time created one of the many terrible moments of the Holocaust. Also, the image of the whole represents the sum of the snatched visions of the tower at Birkenau (the drawings).

Of the physical appearance of the net, the following quote from Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’ is very pertinent:

“I also have my crochet,
It dates from when I began to think,
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole,
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing,
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.”

The image of the net looks like a ‘dream-catcher’ and in many ways that works in respect of this theme; dreams which many would have had of going back home, trapped in its strings. (There is also the idea of the writes of the telegraph poles carrying messages out of the camp and across Europe).

I was also thinking today about work by two of my colleagues which was very much to do with colour. This made me look at my own work (which is anything but colourful) and the subsequent contrast interested me. It reminded me of a television programme I watched last night about the photographer Albert-Kahn who documented the First World War in colour photographs. When we think of the past, in terms of the war, pre-war and Victorian periods, we think of it in terms of black and white. When we see colour photographs of the First World War they seem to validate reality – the very fact of time before we were born.

In my work there is no colour as such, but it is there, just as colour is there in Black and White photographs.

In the image above, I was reminded of the stained glass windows in the many tombs of Montmartre and Pere Lachaise cemeteries. The lines of the image (of the net) could just as easily be the lead work of a broken stained-glass window; what is missing of course is the colour.

Colour could be a validating factor in this case. Often when we think of the Holocaust or World War One for example, we see them in Black and White (like the cats (although evidence suggests they may have limited colour vision) we saw in the cemetery); we often think of the weather as being dull, grey, miserable, always winter, and when we read evidence of the time that talks of blue sky and sun, it always seems somehow shocking. The following is an extract from Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen.”

“‘…You have no idea how tremendous the world looks when you fall out of a closed, packed freight car! The sky is so high…’
‘…and blue…’
‘Exactly, blue, and the trees smell wonderful. The forest – you want to take it in your hand!'”

When imagining arrival at somewhere like Birkenau, one imagines it being night, or the smoke from the chimneys hiding the sky like a fog. But of course, people would have arrived on beautiful summer days, when colour was abundant.

Gesture of the Holocaust

October 25, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

I recently received a copy of the transcript of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, his epic documentary about the Holocaust and read over the part of the film which had, on watching it, affected me so much. In that part, historian Raul Hilberg discusses a document, the Fahrplananordnung 587, an innocuous looking typewritten document (save perhaps for the word ‘Treblinka’) which he reveals, bit by bit, as being anything but innocuous; rather it is a document which in the beaurocratic language of timetables, represents the deaths of some 10,000 Jews. It is just one of many hundreds (the number 587 tells us how many); each of which is a cipher for unimaginable misery and suffering. What follows is part of that transcript:

This is the Fahrplananordnung 587, which is typical for special trains. The number of the order goes to show you how many of them there were, Underneath: Nur fur den Dienstgebrauch – ‘Only for internal use.’ But this turns out to be a very low classification for secrecy. And the fact that in this entire document, which after all deals with death trains, one cannot see – not only on this one, one cannot see it on others – the word geheim, ‘secret’ is astonishing to me. That they would not have done that is very astonishing.

On second thought, I believe that has they labelled it secret, they would have invited a great many enquiries from people who got hold of it. They would then perhaps have raised more questions; they would have focused attention on the thing. And the key to the entire operation from the psychological standpoint was never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken. Say nothing; do these things; do not describe them. So therefore this ‘Nur fur den Dienstgebrauch.’ And now notice to how many recipients this particular order goes. ‘Bfe’ – Bahnhofe. On this stretch there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and here we are in Malkinia, which is of course the station near Treblinka. But notice that is takes eight recipients for this relatively short distance through Radom to the Warsaw district – eight, because the train passes through these stations. Therefore, each one has to know. Not only that, but of course you’re not going to write two pieces of paper if you can write only one.
Therefore, we find here not only PKR, which is a death train, going here in the plan labelled thus, but we also see the empty train after it has arrived in Treblinka, now originating in Treblinka, and you can always know whether it’s an empty train with the letter L in front of it, leer, and now –
Ruckleitung des Leerzuges, which means ‘return of the empty train’.
– the train returns empty. And now we’re going back. Then we have another train. Now notice that there is very little subtlety to this numbering system. We are going from 9228 to 9229, to 9230, to 9231, to 9232. Hardly any originality here. It’s just very regular traffic.
Death traffic.
Death traffic. And here we see that starting out in one ghetto, which is obviously being emptied, the train leaves for Treblinka. It leaves on the thirtieth of September, 1942, eighteen minutes after four o’clock – by the schedule at least – and arrives there at eleven twenty four on the next morning. This is also a very long train, which may be the reason it is so slow. It’s a 50G – fünfzig Güterwagen – fifty freight cars filled with people.
That’s an exceptionally heavy transport. Now once the train has been loaded at Treblinka – and you notice there are two numbers here: 11:24, that’s in the morning, and 15:59, which is to say almost four o’clock in the afternoon – in that interval of time the train has to be unloaded, cleaned and turned around. And you see here the same numbers appear as the Leerzug, the now empty train, goes to another place. And it leaves at four o’clock in the afternoon and goes now to that other place where is yet another small town where it picks up victims. And there you are at three o’clock in the morning. It leaves on the twenty-third at three o’clock in the morning. And arrives there the next day.

What is that? It seems to be the same train.

It is the same – quite obviously the same. The number has to be changed quite obviously. Correct. Then it goes back to Treblinka and this is again a long trip; and it now goes back to yet another place – the same situation, the same trip. And then yet another. Goes to Treblinka and then arrives in Czestochowa the twenty-ninth of September and then the cycle is complete. And this is called a Fahrplananordnung. If you count up the number of not empty trains but full ones – PKRs – there’s one – there’s one here, that’s two, that’s three, that’s four – we may be talking about ten thousand dead Jews on this Fahrplananordnung here.

What I saw as being described here was in many respects a gesture of the Holocaust. The gesture of a thing, whether it is an object or a system, is essentially a movement and with this passage, the underlying movement of all the documented horrors becomes apparent. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, it is banal. So can I really discover the gesture of the Holocaust? Or at least a part of it?

Weeping

October 20, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

The following drawing is part of a series I’ve been working on regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau and the theme of pathways.

Looking at the picture, I was reminded of something which for a while escaped me. There was something about the tower in particular which I was sure bore a striking resemblance with another, famous painting.

The following is a detail from the drawing.

Looking at it closely, at the apparent anguish and suffering in the ‘face’ of the tower (the tower as suffering goes against all I have written about it so far: “…the gate house is different, it knows its time has passed but doesn’t seem ashamed in anyway. Its almost as if it relives every moment in its glass eyes, glass eyes which are far from being blind. They don’t reflect what they see around them now but rather what has been, what the tower wants to remember…”) made me think at once of the painting I’d been thinking of, an image painted in 1937 and again, one of the utmost despair: Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’.

New Studio, New Work

October 19, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

I have finally got myself into gear as regards moving into my studio at Magdalen Road and have now started to get some work done. I started with putting some pictures up on the wall (those I made after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau) and was struck by how different they appeared when shown all together. When I first showed them they were on two walls and all in a row, but having them all on one wall lent them a whole different – and more sinister – aspect.

They’ve always been rather intimidating images, but now there was something relentless and almost obsessive about them; as a group they seemed to talk more; but this was not a dialogue between the pictures and the viewer (me in this case, but I believe it would have the same effect with anyone else) it was now more like an internal monologue – the externalisation of a guilty conscience. I thought about wallpapering them to the walls which would I think strengthen their obsessive quality.
I also drew more of the ‘collective views’ which are interesting. They too have the same relentless, clawing quality, but do not have quite the same connotations of guilt which one gets from repeated and near identical images.

As I drew these images, I ‘found my way’ back inside the camp, seeing it clearly in my mind as I drew with my eyes closed. I followed the various lines, in particular the railways tracks, the wire fences and the telegraph wires. And as my pen marked them on the page, I began to think about their functions. The train tracks were a means to the outside world, they were defined by their end points – outside, beyond the camp – connected to the great European cities and the home towns of many who died there. The telegraph wires were likewise a means of communicating with the outside world, which for those in the camp was an impossible dream – something quite unreal. All I could think as I drew, was the ‘image’ of screams being carried down the wires. Sadly the outside world wasn’t listening.

Having worked on the drawings for a while, I then began to work on an idea I sketched out a while ago.

I started working on the knot using the balls of string which I dyed last week and as I began to build up the knot I found that the dye hadn’t taken properly which nevertheless produced and interesting effect as the knot grew.

.

Any work associated with the Holocaust and which is realised with fabric has certain connotations, but what interested me particularly was what I’d thought about whilst drawing earlier – in particular the telegraph wires. The cut strings trailing on the floor – which represent the cut threads of life – became telegraph wires in my mind.

Could I perhaps use wires instead of string?

Printmaking – A Reflection III

October 18, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Yesterday I carried on with the process I initiated two weeks ago, that of burying an engraved plate, leaving it a week and then printing the rusted version. Having dug up the plate after a second period in the ground, I was pleased with the resulting pattern of rust which I hoped would be lifted onto the paper by some of the ink during the printing process.

The resulting print from this plate was as follows.

The thing I realised with printing from such a rusted plate was the fact that the rust has quite a pull on the ink, and so once the paper has been through the press and one lifts it from the plate, it has a tendency to be left behind. With the print above, I was somewhat disappointed that the rust was ‘drowned out’ by the ink – hardly surprising when I think how thickly it was applied. Of course this is normal, but whereas one can use the scrim to take the ink off, and use quite a bit of pressure to do so, with the rust one doesn’t want to rub so much (and thereby remove it) and so the ink remains too thick in these areas.

I took a second print of the plate without re-inking and and the texture of the rust was well preserved.

For the next print (after a third week in the ground the plate will be even rustier) I need to ink the particularly rusted sections less and perhaps moisten the rust to encourage it to lift off the plate.
As well as continuing this experiment, I also started working with photo-polymer plates. A photograph is printed onto acetate (with all black areas ‘removed’/greyed) and this positive is then used to ‘etch’ the plate. The plate is sensitive to UV light and so this is done in a darkroom in a UV box. The light passes through the acetate and exposes the plate in the darker areas. When the plate is washed and inked, these areas then take the ink which is then printed onto the page.

In order to get a good print, one needs to make two or three proofs, the results of which are below (those on the left being the first).

The question I have to ask myself now is what does it mean to print these photographs as etchings? Something to consider over the next few days.

Anne Frank’s Tree

October 5, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

With the work I’ve been doing on trees at the sites of death camps in Poland, I found the following article, taken from the BBC News site very interesting.

The chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II has won a reprieve from being felled. Amsterdam city council ruled in March that the rotting 150-year-old tree must be felled as a danger to the public. Following protests the council has given those who want to save the tree until January to come up with a plan.

The tree was a ray of hope for the famous diary writer as she hid in the attic of the canal-side warehouse.The Jewish teenager remained indoors with her family for 25 months until they were arrested in August 1944.She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp in March 1945.

The attic window from which Anne Frank could see the tree was the only one that had not been blacked out.In an entry dated February 23, 1944, she wrote: “From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind…

“As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

Ton Boon of the Amsterdam Centrum borough told Agence France-Presse news agency there was “only one Anne Frank tree” and it had been agreed to allow time for a possible rescue plan.

Experts say the 27-tonne tree is too diseased from fungi to be saved and the owner wants it cut down as he would be liable for any damage caused should it fall. The tree is adjacent to the building that now houses the Anne Frank Museum. A Utrecht-based firm, Trees Institute, has suggested a salvage plan involving treatment and support for the trunk and limbs.

Spokesman Edwin Koot told Associated Press: “The tree represented freedom… to Anne Frank. We must go the extra mile to try to save it.”

Chania

August 22, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

It was in the small square, at southern end of Kondylaki Street, where we met two brothers, coaxing as best they could, passing tourists into their restaurant. “My brother and I are having a party,” they told us, “at 7.30.” They handed us a card. “You’re nice people, where are you from?” They’d asked the same question, albeit more pointedly (and with a heavy dose of irony) to those who’d ignored their advances. England, I said, and Monika, from Poland. Funny how when speaking English to foreigners, I do so with an accent; one which I presume is something akin to – as in this case – the Greek way of speaking. I’d done as much in Spain a few weeks back, ordering a beer as if I was Speedy Gonzalez. “Ah, Poland! Where in Poland? Krakow? Warszawa? Katowice? Czestochowa?” Warszawa, came the reply. “The best!” one of the brothers replied, with acute comic timing; it was clear they’d been doing this for quite some time. “It starts at 7.30 and…” one added, as an aside, but yet, with a certain flourish, “I assure you, my mother and my sister are in the kitchen…” As if we needed such assurances.

Having already walked around much of Chania, I had the impression that aside from the 15^th century lighthouse, many of the town’s landmarks, or architectural points of interest, somehow lurked around streets such as this one. They stood in corners, perched above the roads (or lay below ground level) stealing themselves away in shadows, rather than standing out as buildings often do, waiting like dressed up grandparents for a visit. This is certainly not a criticism (far from it), and there are of course exceptions to this – for want of a better word – rule. But generally speaking, Chania’s visual history is there to be found rather than simply observed. Of course, no building in any town or city gives up its secrets through simple observation; one must enter into some sort of a dialogue. But in the way in which a building might give up its secrets, so Chania gives up its buildings.

The history of the town is as interesting as it is often tragic, and the scars of war and conquest are manifest in its palimpsestic array of buildings, many of whose origins date back to the Venetian era (13th to mid 17th century). It is the site of the ancient Minoan settlement of Cydonia (evidence of which can be seen in the Kasteli district in the Old Town), and has been ruled successively by Byzantines, Arabs, Ventians and Ottamans, who overran the city in 1645. Finally, in 1941, the Nazis took control and another tragic page in Chania’s history was written.

Walking around the town, we found evidence of this tumultuous past in churches turned into mosques and mosques turned back into churches; Islamic arches filled in and plain windows set within the stones. I’ve always harboured an interest in blocked up doors and windows, and here in Chania there were many examples. And this is what I find so fascinating about the town; the fact that ruins are not isolated but are used again in other buildings, that successive architectural values give rise to conflated, unique, and idiosyncratic styles; that where one regime follows another, the past is not torn down, but is modified (one is reminded here of recent debates surrounding communist buildings in post-communist countries).

The Janissaries Mosque for example on the western harbour, built in 1645 is now an art gallery, and on its facade one can still see portions of Arabic reliefs – scripts carved from out of the stone. The calligraphy is worn and whispering, yet its presence is a clear reminder of the past. And all around Chania, it is these shards which pierce the consciousness of the traveller; Venetian windows and doorways plugged into tumbledown houses appear like childhood memories from nowhere, and one realises that Chania is not a town of buildings at all, but rather one constructed entirely of fragments. And such is the the number of fragments revealed to those who walk the streets, I found myself – as a typical tourist – taking numerous photographs. My camera was readied as if I was on safari, ready to capture an exquisite Venetian architrave, which might, at any moment disappear back into the shadows. I remember writing a while back, a novel set in my home town Oxford, where the young protagonist observed through an iron gate, one of the last remaining Bastions of the old city wall. “St. Cross was the daughter church of St. Peter in the East and was situated not far from that church in a street of the same name. It was approached by Longwall Street, towards the end of which, just before the junction with Hollywell and St. Cross Road, Adam’s pace slowed in anticipation of the gate through which could be glimpsed a remnant of Oxford’s mediaeval past. It was one of his favourite monuments, but no matter how contrived and deliberate his steps, the lone bastion of the old city wall seemed to fall from sight as if glimpsed from a passing car, as though no mortal eyes could frame it for longer than the time it took to blink. It was as if through the bars, the centuries passed still lingered, appearing in a space built for a second.” This is how I felt, when finding evidence of the past in these remnants of windows and doors. I would stand and try to build the past around them, that from which they were – for a few seconds at least – conspicuously estranged. But no matter how long I looked, for example at the window below, my gaze could never do justice to the scale of the past behind it.

Even when looking at the photographs, I find the same thing applies, and I’m reminded of a quote from Proust, as discussed in a text by Samuel Beckett: “But were I granted time to accomplish my work, I would not fail to stamp it with the seal of that Time, now so forcibly present to my mind, and in it I would describe men, even at the risk of giving them the appearance of monstrous beings, as occupying in Time a much greater piece than that so sparingly conceded to them in Space, a place indeed extended beyond measure, because, like giants plunged in the years, they touch at once those periods of their lives – separated by so many days – so far apart in Time.” These elements, these architectural shards, are like parts of those same-said giants, parts of limbs touching the present day. We cannot observe with one look the beings as a whole, we can only walk and see in pieces what constitutes the sum, a sum which can only ever be imagined.

I’d thought, whilst walking around Chania, how with every step it seemed to change, as if one were walking through a huge kaleidoscope – a image enhanced by the colour in the streets; the kitsch fodder for tourists, the pink hues of the closing day and the swarms of people, emerging to devour the night, flitting about the myriad lights. The town’s character is revealed through whatever fragment it chooses to present the viewer, at whatever time: a window’s architrave, a decorative lintel, an old vaulted ceiling in one of the many restaurants. I could imagine a mass of giants, writhing beneath the cover of Chania’s single facade, itself like a blanket – a patchwork quilt by which the past is covered.

On the bus to Heathrow, just the week before we found ourselves in Chania, I had been considering my work on the Holocaust and considering the question which so many ask me, ‘why are you interested?’ There is, I have since realised, a reason why, but in the process of finding the answer, I found myself considering other traumatic events and in particular the places where these events were played out, whether Auschwitz-Birkenau, the battlefields of World War 1 or a single cell in the Tower of London. Recently too, I’ve been watching Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ and whilst listening to the testimonies of survivors, I thought of those places I had visited; Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Belzec. Listening to (and indeed watching) the testimonies of those who perpetrated such crimes (‘may I takes notes?’ asks one, as if learning the facts of the crimes for the first time and thereby denying his own involvement), I found it hard to see, in the faces of men who looked like any other grandfather, the face of the monsters they were (excepting Josef Oberhauser, interviewed by Lanzmann in a Berlin bar). The truth is – and this is what makes the Holocaust all the more terrible – ordinary people, who outside of war would, in all likelihood, have led ordinary lives, did in war, unspeakable things. Likewise, ordinary places became sites of gross inhumanity, trees became soldiers, as if beneath the surface, there exists a poison, which surfaces in history and debases everything and everyone it touches, disappearing to leave the world silent, the victims dead and perpetrators old, old men, hoping that age might rob them of what they’ve done.

Walking up Kondylaki street, away from the harbour, we saw a sign for the the Etz Hayyim Synagogue. We followed the sign, and as if the giants moved beneath the surface of Chania’s long facade, a doorway opened up to us.

The free literature explained how: ‘the synagogue was reconstructed under the aegis of the World Monuments Fund in New York and the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece…’ and that ‘…while committed to its Jewish character Etz Hayyim is also sensitive to the multi-ethnic and religious needs of our times and its doors are open to provide a haven for all persons seeking a place of spiritual repose and regeneration.’

Indeed it was a place of great tranquility; a peace at odds with the past, and the sad history of those who once prayed there.

Turning back to the pamphlet supplied by the synagogue, I read the following section, entitled ‘The 2nd World War and the Jews of Hania – 1941-1944’. It read: Suddenly, just before dawn on the 29th May 1944, the entire area in which the Jews lived was blocked off by trucks and loudspeakers ordered the Jews out into the street. They were not allowed to take anything with them and were assembled at the south end of Kondylaki Street in the small square and in the square adjacent to the harbour to the north. Within an hour they were driven by trucks to the prison of Ayas not far from Hania. The Jewish Quarter was immediately looted – first by the soldiers. In the late afternoon they synagogue of Etz Hayyim was stripped of all its religious artefacts and left to be rented by squatters. After almost two weeks of imprisonment at Ayas, with little food and no changes of clothes, the Jews of Hania were loaded onto trucks and driven to the east of the island to Herakleion. The official count is that 265 men, women and children arrived there on the 9th June and were put on board a converted tanker called the Tanais that set sail for Athens that evening at 8.00. Along with them were some 600 Greek and Italian prisoners of war. At 3.15am on the morning of the 10th June the ship was sighted just off the island of Milos by a British submarine and immediately given a torpedo broadside that broke the ship apart. All who were aboard were drowned. Had the ship arrived in Athens the Jews on board would have been sent by cattle-cars to Auschwitz-Birkenau for immediate gassing and cremation which is what had already happened to the Jews of Salonika and elsewhere in Greece. 94% of the Jews of Greece perished in the ‘Final Solution’ of the Nazis.

It was hard to imagine, walking back up this street and around those of the old Jewish Quarter, how such a thing could have happened here. But it did.

“You are nice people…” one of the brothers said. He was again being sarcastic. The group of tourists had declined his advances and so he fixed his eyes on a female member of the party, and drew his hands down, as if to trace her curves. He looked at me and winked, nodding in her direction. I smiled and walked on.

On Old Photographs

June 13, 2007 by Nicholas Hedges

Over the course of the past week, I’ve been scanning in what amounts to almost my entire collection of family photographs. I started, initially, a while ago with just a few that I particularly liked, but after a time, began to think of scanning all those contained in various old albums, a plastic bag and a dilapidated cardboard box. The possibility that one day they would be lost was as good a reason as any; that and the fact it would be easier to view them and to organise them (through the joys of Flickr) were my principal motives.

So, staying up late into the night, I have, over the last few days become somewhat obsessive, and scanned in a few hundred photographs, covering a period of time between c.1946 to c.1997. And, although at first this was a purely practical exericse, it soon became much more than this. It was, and still is, a journey of discovery, for in these small, ‘chemical annexations’, I can see again faces long since lost to the past; revisit once familiar places, and perhaps most poignantly of all, find long lost objects as if I were rummaging through the contents of an attic.

I will write about this experience at length, but will conclude with a summary of what I’ve been thinking when looking at these images. Firstly, I’ve come to realise how drawn I am to ‘bad’ photographs such as the one below:

There is something about this photograph (and many others like it) which I find particulary haunting; something about its amateurishness, which makes it seem somehow more genuine. It has the freshness of a sketch as opposed to a finished painting and contains references to an experience which is both direct and profound. Perhaps it is the footprints in the sand, long since washed away which I find so affecting? Or maybe the unknown swimmers and the water-skiier: distant then, and as just as unknown to me now. What course did they take through life after this picture was taken? Did they yet survive the sea, in which, in time, we all will come to be drowned?
As Barthes said:

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

The photograph above seems to illustrate this perfectly, as do many ‘bad photographs’ I have found. Perhaps it’s because they contain this reference to the less than falable human holding the camera (a difference between chemical and digital).

Following on from this, I’ve become very interested in the peripheral parts of photographs, particularly in relation to images taken near the sea (distant swimmers, ships and so on). I have already written about windows in relation to other photographs, but having recently scanned and observed so many images, I’ve come to realise that it’s these areas which are the most ‘genuine’, perhaps because those inhabiting the distance are freed from the artifice of a pose, or because at the moment the picture was taken (just as they were for the rest of their lives) they were oblivious to the photograph’s principal subject and the one taking the picture.

This obliviousness is something I find quite compelling, particularly in relation to my work on the Holocaust, whose victims were by and large anonymous, both in life and now in death. Although I wasn’t living at the time, many members of my family were; they were the ones on the periphery, the specks in the distance, oblivious to what was going on behind them.

This is a photograph taken in c.1976. It shows my brother in the foreground playing tennis, a lovely image of a fondly remembered family holiday. But what interests me, in relation to my thinking, is the distance.

Looking out to sea we can see a ship, a tanker, sailing under the direction of more (and no doubt large numbers of) human beings, hidden away and quite unknowable. Yet for a time we shared the same stretch of the planet. Those onboard would have had no idea as to our existence, they would have seen at best a mass of coloured dots on the horizon. Yet this degree of separation does not make us any less human, any less feeling. Distance does not negate our hopes and our ambitions. Those few unknowable dots, in the eyes of the ship’s crew, were my family, and have in the years that followed, seen more members come and go. And whether the distance between us is measured in years or miles, we must never forget, that what we see as specs on the horizon, or dots that make the picture on the TV screen, are, in the end, the same people as us.

For more on this subject, click here.