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.