How can new historical perspectives on the synergy between Hitler and Stalin’s terror resonate in the contemporary moment? To A Place Of Time, Held Within Four Walls is a limited edition archive of thirteen different related photo books, each exploring the unique possibilities of combining and juxtaposing images and texts according to its particular form.
The work juxtaposes images of soviet era housing projects with the adjacent forests, sites of the murderous policies enacted by Hitler and Stalin in the 30’s and 40’s. It is a meditation on the nature of totalitarian rule and the way that the built environment reflects ideology and overlapping histories. Equally, it sheds light on America’s influence on Hitler’s policies (race laws in the American South and the removal of indigenous people from lands in the West) and it is illuminated by the horrible war stemming from Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine.
All of the images I made between 2016-2019 in the European lands east of Berlin and west of Moscow: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine (and also Berlin). To A Place Of Time, Held Within Four Walls honors the 13 million non-combatants murdered between 1932-45 in this area that Timothy Snyder refers to as the bloodlands, including more than 5 million European Jews.
“Our conversation with history… is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” –W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Below are a selection of images of the archive and each of the representative books inside. (From the menu above, you can select each of the associated books individaully from the Books~To A Place In Time tab).
“Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same”.
–Timothy Snyder, Black Earth
Unseen Press 