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White Noise (1999-2000)

 

The images of White Noise are the result of a photographic search for the lost past and were produced during a journey between Auschwitz and Belzec. This journey was based on Martin Gilbert’s book, ‘The Holocaust Journey’, in which Gilbert and a group of students travelled through Eastern Europe guided by the relics and traces of a lost Jewish past. Gilbert’s insightful account allowed me to reach beneath the surface, to extract and identify silent witnesses and to attach the still standing trees and walls to specific events. At all times I was aware of the photographic impossibility of the subject; how could I possibly describe the indescribable, or, as Theodor Adorno once questioned, how can anyone write poetry after Auschwitz?

 

I attempted to address the paradox with white monochromes, non-descriptive silences, images of burned soil covered by virginal snow. Whilst staring through the windows of moving trains,  taking pictures of the passing time, I looked at an exact landscape, attempting to grasp the tangible, but always submitting to fleeting moments.

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