How We See The World Project Statement
The essential ethics of seeing underpins my landscape works.
Over the last decade I have focused on the recurrence of genocide and our collective responsibility as public witness. I use the landscape metaphorically to draw connections between each of these disparate and dark moments in modern history, while suggesting that we, as members of an amorphous humanity, form the true connective tissue between them.
To date this project includes landscape works from Namibia, Poland, Ukraine, Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, all made within witness distance of sites where acts of genocide were perpetrated.
Namibia was the site of the first genocide of the twentieth century, where the German occupiers of what was then South West Africa developed and tested concentration camps, which they brutally deployed against the Herero and Nama population from 1904-08.
During the Second World War, the first mass victims of the Holocaust were often taken from their homes to locations just outside the towns and villages where they lived. There they were shot. The images from Poland and Ukraine examine those landscapes.
In Rwanda in 1994, one million people were killed in one hundred days, making it the most efficient killing rampage of the 20th century. In Rwanda the metaphoric idea of landscape as witness is particularly fitting -- there is virtually no landscape in that small and beautiful country that did not bear witness to the atrocities of genocide.
And in Bosnia, the Srebrenica genocide was perhaps the most spectacular failing of the international community in a long line of failures to intervene in time to stop genocide. American and European government leaders and policymakers had more visibility into the events that preceded the Srebrenica genocide than perhaps with any other genocide of the 20th century. And still failed to take action.
In contrast to the specific locations I shoot, the images are intentionally non-specific. My intent is for the photographs to counter the way information on this topic is typically disseminated – through the precise lens of the photojournalist, historian, or documentarian. How I make each image is critical to the project’s concept – using a single exposure, without any compositing or layering in post-production. By using visual tools of abstraction, I try to expose the layered landscape: its complexities, varied interpretations, and the memories it evokes. The concept of “veils” features prominently in my work. In creating a “veiled view,” by moving the camera during the exposure, I reflect on the self imposed veils through which we bear witness, suggesting that it is our veiled societal view that continues to upend our unfulfilled promise of "never again."
Metaphorically, the landscape – like us – witnesses all. It sheds its leaves in cover-up and complicity. But through its rebirth, so it rejuvenates. It carries with it the traces of the past and promises of the future. It triumphs over trauma. It is inextricably intertwined with our darkest moments and brightest days.
In these works, I am preoccupied with making aesthetic images as opposed to documenting brutal facts. By creating these images, my hope is to provide for moments of reflection as viewers interpret the work in their own way and re-engage with subject matter we think we know.
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Acknowledgments:
I am grateful to Namibian genocide activist Kambanda Veii. Without her efforts and insights, my experience in Namibia would not have been possible. In Bosnia, the team at The Srebrenica Memorial Centre was instrumental in managing all the logistics for my shoot. I am indebted to the team there and to survivor Muhizin Omerovic for making my work in Srebrenica and the surrounding areas possible. For the work in Rwanda, I am grateful to The Aegis Trust and the staff at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre for their help with research, logistics and identification of critical locations throughout Rwanda. For the work in Poland and Ukraine, I extend my sincere thanks to Yahad-In Unum, the French non-profit organization started by Father Patrick Desbois to investigate the genocide of the Second World War for providing detailed location data of unmarked mass graves in Poland and Ukraine. Further, I was only able to identify several locations of acts of genocide in Poland thanks to the research that the Office of Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland, so openly shared with me.