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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 *
The present-day traces of the Jewish past in Poland are complex.
Jewish life lay in ruins after the Holocaust. Much evidence of ruin
remains, but there are also widespread traces that bear witness to
the elaborate Jewish culture that once flourished there, even in
villages and small towns. One also sees places where Jews were
murdered by the Germans in the war: not only in death camps and
ghettos, but also in fields, forests, rivers, and cemeteries. After
the war forty years of communism suppressed even the memory of the
destroyed Jewish heritage. Today, by contrast, the historic Jewish
culture of Poland is increasingly being memorialized, by local
Poles as well as by foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are
being renovated, monuments and museums are being set up. There are
festivals of Jewish culture, hasidic pilgrims, and Jewish tourists;
and local people who rescued Jews during the war are being
honoured. In rediscovering the traces of memory one also finds
clear signs of a local Jewish revival. This extensively revised
second edition includes forty-five new photographs and updated
explanatory texts. Together they suggest how to make sense of the
past and discover its relevance for the present. This innovative,
multi-layered book will appeal to everyone concerned with questions
of history, memory, and identity.
When, in 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took a simple picture of passengers
on a ship bound for Europe, he could not have known that "The
Steerage", as it was soon called, would become a modernist icon
and, from today's vantage, arguably the most famous photograph made
by an American photographer. In complementary essays, a photo
historian and a photographer reassess this important picture,
rediscovering the complex social and aesthetic ideas that informed
it and explaining how over the years it has achieved its status as
a masterpiece. What aspects of Stieglitz's ideas and
sometimes-murky ambitions help us understand the picture's
achievements? How should we assess the photograph in relation to
Stieglitz's many writings about it? The authors of this book
explore what "The Steerage" might mean in at least two senses - by
itself, as a grand and self-sufficient work, and also ineluctably
bound up with the many stories told about it. They make the
photograph, today, what Stieglitz himself made it over the years -
a photo-text work.
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