On European ground

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A profound visual meditation on the trauma that scars twentieth-century Europe, this work considers the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps, and the Berlin Wall, highlighting the gap between our memories of these sites and their current reality. By walking these locations and photographing the ground where history has dissolved, the author opens a space for reflection on their complex legacies. The images evoke solemn beauty while engaging with history's most pressing themes. Photographs of trenches and bunkers at Somme and Verdun reveal the tension between past violence and the inscrutability of their remnants. Images from Dachau and Auschwitz provoke a dialogue between the ordinariness of these sites today and their haunting memories, illustrating the diminishing perceptual connection to the Holocaust. The photographs of the Berlin Wall capture its physical erosion and looming disappearance, transforming it into a memorialized abstraction. Accompanying the images are essays by Sander Gilman and Jonathan Bordo, along with an interview with the author by Roberta Smith of the New York Times. These essays provide an introduction and aesthetic analysis of the work, while the interview explores the complex issues of history and memory uniquely captured in the photographs.