The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the
span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of
the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation.
For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled with the
afterlife of the genocide, creating a large number of photoworks
and essays, including extensive work with the Galicia Jewish Museum
in Krakow, Poland. At the center of his work work has been his
long-term project Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the
Holocaust in Time, begun in 2010. With a large format camera and
antique lenses, Jason Francisco has undertaken a series of deep
journeys extending from Berlin in the west to Kharkov in the east,
Riga in the north to Bucharest in the south-for the sake of images
that might carry the complications of remembering and forgetting in
the places where the events we collectively call the Holocaust
occurred. His destinations included the notorious sites of the
genocide, such as Auschwitz and the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz,
which often are taken to stand for the whole. And has made his way
to hundreds of small, often remote concentrationary sites in
Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia,
Hungary and Slovakia-massacre sites in forests, fields, riverbanks
and cemeteries, deportation routes, subcamps, labor camps, transit
camps, short-term ghettoes, escape routes, hiding places, not to
mention countless sites of erstwhile Jewish life and civilization,
some intact, more in ruins, vastly more in states of nothingness.
Jason Francisco's decentralized approach follows recent
scholarship, which has identified more than 42,500 locations in
Nazi-occupied Europe where the Holocaust was perpetrated: venturing
into the physical geography of the genocide venturing into the
territory of remembrance and forgetting, and search for an image
form that might carry register what he found and felt. In its
method and form, Alive and Destroyed is an unconventional work of
witness. Documentary in spirit and conceptualist in method, it does
not use photography to "capture" the worlds that the Holocaust left
behind-to use the most common metaphor for the photographic act,
itself reflecting a carceral understanding of photography as a
medium. Rather Alive and Destroyed draws on the capacities of
photography to test and redefine what we mean by presence and
absence in memory and imagination. The photographs in Alive and
Destroyed set out to release-to uncapture-the volatile mixture of
incomprehension, argument, reclamation and loss that constitute the
Holocaust as an inheritance for the living. Beyond being
representations of sites in the world the Holocaust left behind,
the images in Alive and Destroyed are themselves primary sites of
meditation and mourning. -- Jason Francisco * Jason Francisco *
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
