Alive and Destroyed
If a stranger did show up, and if he saw all this, if he was not already a prophet, he would not become one. Rather he would sense that the thresholds on which the night watchmen once sat were already mourning thresholds, and that to reveal the picture, to see into it truly, only required hanging a death lamp.
––Der Nister
Alive and Destroyed (2010-ongoing) concerns the challenges of photographic remembrance of the Holocaust in Poland and Ukraine. Like much of my work, the project combines images and words, using one mode of address to search and extend the other. The photographs negotiate the visible remains and also the invisibility of the Holocaust’s crimes, primarily in the smaller locations where the genocide occurred––short-lived concentration camps, transit camps, forced labor camps, execution sites, mass graves, villages, towns (including my own family’s ancestral towns)––as well as the larger and more centrifugal sites such as city ghettoes and the extermination camps. Paired with each image is an extended caption about the locations pictured. The work concludes with a longer essay on the religious, philosophic, literary and artistic issues with which I have wrestled for many years concerning the representation of atrocity.
The photographs are overtly experimental in their approach, and deserve a brief explanation. Each picture combines two photographs made with a 4x5 camera, one photograph in color with the camera configured to pick out a particular focal corridor in space, the other in black and white with a differing focal corridor. Often the process of finding these focal corridors introduces further differences in the shape and placement of forms between the two images. After scanning the negatives, I combine them in Photoshop to form a single image, using a relatively straightforward digital layering process. The result is a shifting, misregistered picture whose contributing parts cannot be fully reconciled optically or interpretively. This irreconciliation is, for me, crucially important. It amounts to a visual analogue for the dialectics of remembrance, and a way of shifting photographic address to binary rather than unitary terms: observable as it meets unobservable, trace as it meets tracelessness, specificity as it meets ambiguity, fact as it meets conjecture, still-to-be-seen as it meets already-gone.
Underpinning my thinking is a recognition that the very premises of “not forgetting” are due to shift in the coming years, as we lose survivors and first-hand connection to the past. As an American Jew born a generation after the end of the Second World War, I am at best an indirect witness living near but not in the time of the events, and so I understand my project as a work of remembrance as distinguished from a work of memory. The differences between the two terms (as I approach them) are subtle but important. Where memory is concerned with the accuracy of representations of the past, remembrance is concerned with the adequacy of the imagination for the past. Where memory is concerned with the past on its own terms, remembrance is preoccupied with the past on the terms of the present that keeps coming. Or to put it another way: where memory retrieves, remembrance elaborates. Where memory returns, remembrance turns toward. Where memory clutches, remembrance handles.
It seems to me that if photographs are to be equal to the task of remembrance, they should counter—or complement—the expository approach to depiction traditionally associated with documentary, in which the image provides a surrogate presence for the world-seen, confirming and indeed “capturing” what it shows (to use the dominant metaphor for the photographic act). When it comes to communicating genocide and its aftermath—primary-order rupture, compounded by its displacement in time—my task, as I give it to myself, is to figure out how the photograph can also be a site for the loss of knowledge, and the absence of understanding. I want the images I am making somehow to communicate the catastrophe in ways that are abruptly concrete and appropriately abstract, to make it present but refuse to render it in the mode of presence. I want them to be sufficiently self-disqualifying that they can enunciate the extinctness of meaning that the Holocaust stands for, without capitulating to nihilism. I want them to allow imaginative access to the annihilation without trading on the trope of restaging it in the imagination. I want them to resist the tacit message that either the photographer or the image itself has accomplished the task of witnessing—to pull the viewer in by cutting the viewer loose from an expectation that the image recuperates its subject. I want them to force the viewer constantly toward the fugitive dimensions of suffering, against the urge to treat genocide’s losses as stable memory-objects. Rather, they should figure out how to articulate loss on its own terms, toward an ever fuller and more urgent incompleteness of picturing. The documentary image about genocide that counts, I think, is the one that seeds an engaged and dissatisfied form of viewing, divesting itself of its own authority without forsaking its imperative. I am trying to make just such documentary images.
Beyond this, I understand this project as a critical intervention into the landscape tradition, which has often been used as an auxiliary to, or an aesthetic gloss atop political and social conquest—in the case of the Nazis, the ideology of “blood and soil” derived from the racialist strain of nineteenth century romantic nationalism. The images I wish to make are better called depictions of terrain than landscapes, inasmuch as landscapes almost by definition trade on simple invitations to inhabit the pictured earth sympathetically, inducing a sense of control and “placedness” as subjective states in the viewer. By contrast, the point of the compound photographic images I am making is precisely to draw the viewer toward inner states that are unsettled, ill at ease, defined by successions of questions that are sometimes labyrinths and sometimes abysses.
Not least, I wish to anticipate a ready criticism of my approach, namely that images that do not submit straightforwardly to explanatory fact lend themselves to a variety of troubling outcomes, such as dehistoricization, misinterpretation, and morally abhorrent aesthetic play. Avoiding these outcomes is just and important. The problem is that the Holocaust as a subject is paradoxically built from rupture, continuously challenging the intactness even of its ruins. The world-historical inheritance it forces on us seems to me to demand what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “perpetual testimony,” precisely in a plurality of forms: historical chronicle and narrative that serve analysis and positive knowledge, together with artistic forms through which we can approach lapse, discontinuity and loss. The task I give myself is to attempt to dilate image with narrative and vice-versa, to approach the catastrophe dialectically and so to offer what might be called “negative representation,” much as “negative theology” approaches the nature of the divine through what does not attach to it as being. If I succeed, even a little, I will have livened the past—not to redeem the catastrophe, but slightly to unblock its conundrums.
Alive and Destroyed: selected images with extended captions