On European Ground - Hardcover

Cohen, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226112942 ISBN 13: 9780226112947

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Cohen Alan

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor

This collection of photographs offer a visual meditation on the traumas that scar 20th-century Europe. Alan Cohen's photographs capture the essence of the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember about these places and what we can still observe in them today. Pictures of the trenches at the Somme and Verdun explore the tension between the violence of the past and the inscrutability of its remnants. Photographs from Dachau and Austwitz solicit dialogue between the bareness of the sites now and the memories and images they evoke. Images of the Berlin Wall show only the footprints of the barricade that once separated two hostile ideologies. They record the physical erosion of the Wall while capturing its reappearance as a memorialized abstraction. Essays and an interview with Cohen accompany the photographs. The essays provide an aesthetic analysis of Cohen's work, while the interview discusses the problem of history and memory.

Nota de la solapa

A profound visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe, Alan Cohen'sOn European Ground considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember about these places and what we can still observe in them today. By walking these sites and photographing the very ground in which their history has dissolved, Cohen opens a space for reflection on their complex gravity and legacy.

Cohen's images achieve a solemn beauty even as they engage history at its most topical. Pictures of trenches and bunkers at the battlefields of Somme and Verdun explore the tension between the violence of the past and the inscrutability of its remnants. Photographs from the grounds of Dachau and Auschwitz solicit a provocative dialogue between the ordinariness of these sites today and their haunting memory. They teach us, as theNew Art Examiner notes, "that the living perceptual connection to the Holocaust is vanishing." Images of the Berlin Wall show only the footprint of the barricade that once separated two hostile ideologies. They record the physical erosion and looming disappearance of the Wall while capturing its reappearance as a memorialized abstraction.

Accompanying the photographs in On European Ground are essays by Sander Gilman and Jonathan Bordo, as well as an interview with Cohen by critic Roberta Smith of theNew York Times. The essays present both an introduction to and aesthetic analysis of Cohen's work, while the interview discusses the intractable problems of history and memory that his photographs so uniquely capture.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0226112942
• ISBN 13: 9780226112947
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128