Publisher: Aperture, 2020
Language: English

 

​Photography: An-My Lê
Text: Lisa Sutcliffe and David Finkel
Interview: Viet Thanh Nguyen

An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of the Vietnamese American artist, published on the occasion of a major exhibition organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Drawing, in part, from her own experiences of the Vietnam War, Lê has created a body of work committed to expanding and complicating our understanding of the activities and motivations behind conflict and war. Throughout her thirty-year career, Lê has photographed noncombatant roles of active-duty service members, often on the sites of former battlefields, including those reserved for training or the reenactment of war, and those created as film sets.

This publication includes selections from her well-known series Viêt Nam, Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, in addition to never-before-seen images, including recent photographs from the US-Mexico border, formative early work, and lesser-known projects. Essays by the organizing curator Dan Leers and curator Lisa J. Sutcliffe, as well as a dialogue between Lê and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address the ways in which Lê’s quiet, nuanced work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity.

Copublished by Aperture and Carnegie Museum of Art

Publisher:  Self published
Language: English

 

​Photography and text: Justyna Mielnikiewicz

The original idea of Ukraine Runs Through It was to document the country away from daily politics with the Dnipro River as the metaphorical line of reference. When I started photographing in the spring of 2014, I had to adjust that concept. Witnessing the immediate and profound impact the revolution and the war had on people’s daily lives became an important element of my work, an inherent undercurrent in the river-themed project.

Mykola (Nikolai) Gogol in his essay titled “A Glance at the Composition of Little Russia” wrote that “much in history is decided by geography.” While in the past, the landscape has often served as a natural barrier to invaders, it is not really the case anymore.

Nevertheless, the Dnipro has often been portrayed as the demarcation line between the Ukrainian-speaking western part of the country and the Russian dominated eastern lands. Nowadays it’s a contrived perception, even more so now since the Maidan revolutions and the on-going war. Concept of Little Russia is buried in the past, replaced by country Ukraine.

The same goes for the fabricated issue of divisions based on language. Russian-speaking language rights were used as a pretext to divide people along a reinforced East-West line to instigate unrest. In reality many ethnic Ukrainians use Russian as their first language and a great number of ethnic Russians identify as Ukrainian patriots. Historically, the lingua franca of eastern Ukraine, in particular in its big industrial cities, tends to be Russian, while in the western part of the country, literary Ukrainian is more widely used. Yet in private and in the media people effortlessly mix both languages while speaking to each other as if there was one tongue.

My book covers a time that started at the end of the Revolution of Dignity, which I believe is one of the most compelling periods in the history of modern Ukraine. Few events since the fall of Communism in post-Soviet space have had such acute international ramifications involving both western Europe and the United States. What began as a protest against a corrupt government led to a new leadership but also war with Russia resulting in a massive transformation of society.

Ukrainians neither wanted nor expected that war. How they have coped with it is distinctive while also being a universal story of a nation’s struggle to deal with the turmoil which has been imposed on it.

The stories collected here are the record of a few individual experiences set on the background of central issues driving the transformation of the country and society.

Publisher:  T&T Publishing
Language: English

​Photography and text: Steven Nestor

Monte Cassino: Con Amore is an exploration by Steven Nestor of the destruction of a small Italian town Monte Cassino and its monastery in the Second World War. Surviving copies of The Illustrated London News from 1944 lead Nestor on a journey to discover and record the last remaining traces of the devastation of the town and the Benedictine monastery built on the site of the original Abbey chosen and founded by St Benedict in the 6th century. Blending original material from his research archive alongside his own images, Nestor encourages the viewer to cross into an elusive but violent past. The photographic windows throughout this book look out onto a buried past that continues to inform and shape our present through the fragments that have survived destruction, the passage of time and a human quest to overcome disaster. This is a journey across unremarkable contemporary places and into their dark history: forlorn graffiti semaphores in a space once littered with casualties of battle, a collapsed street sign lies unnoticed on the edge of town and autumn’s mulch burns on the road that snakes its way up to the summit of worship and war.

Nestor’s use of a high-grain photographic film and an old Vrede Box camera transports the viewer back in time to the Italian town of Monte Cassino, the site of a significant and costly WWII battle and the legacy of that conflict. Fragments of images from original copies of The Illustrated London News along with sourced prints and negatives from the war and post-war periods are incorporated into this tapestry of destruction and loss. Together they reimpose and recharge often obscured photographic views from the time of the bombardment of Monte Cassino. Nestor’s work re-connects us with those faint traces of the past still present – just before we forget – as they are condemned to obscurity. His work is an affirmation of the power of photography to connect us with the past, not only of Monte Cassino, but with many sites of conflict throughout the world which are fast fading from living memory.

Publisher:  The Eriskay Connection
Language: English or German edition

Concept and photography: Marc Schroeder
Text: Dr. Heinke Fabritius, Marc Schroeder
Design: Rob van Hoesel

Supported by: Romanian Cultural Institute, National Cultural Fund of Luxembourg

On 16 December 1944 Stalin signed Order 7161ss, the secret command to “mobilise and detain all Germans capable of working, including men aged 17 to 45 years and women 18 to 30 years” from Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Their subsequent deportation to forced labour camps was intended to help reconstruct the Soviet Union and was a form of reparations for the destruction caused by the Second World War. A total of 112,480 men and women were deported. The majority of them – 69,332 individuals – were Germans from Romania. Many deportees died from the harsh labour conditions in freezing temperatures and from insufficient nutrition. All those who had survived the hunger and misery were released in late 1949.

ORDER 7161 is a photo-text book by the Luxembourg photographer Marc Schroeder; throughout its chapters, it recounts the story of the deportation of Romanian Germans via a combination of witness portraits, archival and contextual images and lays bare the trauma of forced internment via an important selection of recorded testimonies by 40 survivors.

Meeting and photographing the survivors was a ‘last chance’ endeavour; many of the deportees Schroeder met were among the youngest in 1945 and most have, since their meeting, passed away. Apart from capturing the individual deportees’ memories about their forced internment, the encounters with survivors also enabled Schroeder to gain an insight into the German minority’s collective ‘cultural memory’ of this injustice and simultaneously to explore the delicate concept of ‘victimhood’ from the perspective of Germans with respect to World War II history.

Ultimately, this thought-provoking book not only bears witness to an often overlooked chapter of European history, but also stands as testimony to the meeting between photographer and each former deportee and reflects the empathic nature of their encounter and exchange.

In 2019, the dummy book was nominated for both the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award (Arles) and the Unseen Dummy Award (Amsterdam).

Including an epilogue by Dr. Heinke Fabritius.

Printed: Grafiche dell’arte, 2019
Language: Italian, English

​Photography: Giancarlo Barzagli
Text: Wu Ming 2
Graphic design: Roberta Donatini
Curated by: Claudia Paladini
Cartography: Massimo Cingotti
Archive Images: Fototeca CIDRA Imola

Grüne Linie is a photographic research on the memory of the events in which a small valley in the Tuscan-Romagnolo Apennines played a crucial role, when it became part of the war front during World War II.
The project traces a line that connects History to the voices of those who fought and lived in those mountains, following the clues that were left on the region, somewhere in between childhood memories and memories of the conflict.
“Grüne Linie” was the name that the German Army had given to the Gothic Line: a strip of defences and fortifications, which ran along the Apennines, cutting Italy in two, from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic coast. A line that wound through woods and villages, filled with stories of courage and fear, revenge and resistance.
Those stories left an indelible signs in the landscape and in the memory of the few remaining witnesses.

In July 1994, the 36th Brigade, the Garibaldi Bianconcini partisans, comprised of roughly 400 fighters, moved into the Rovigo River Valley in the Appenines between Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, bunking down in the farmhouses scattered across the mountains. Although this area was at the centre of German manoeuvres fortifying the Gothic Line, the Command maintained that its impervious terrain would provide a safe place for its partisans and for organising sabotage operations.

Publisher:  GHOST
Language: English

Photography: Brian Griffin

SPUD, a new book by Brian Griffin, inspired by a residency in Béthune-Bruay in Northern France, marks the centenary of the end of World War I. With the coincidence of ‘SPUD’, the informal British word for potato also being slang for low ranking British soldiers in World War I, Griffin began to explore the relationship between the potatoes grown in the soil and the soldiers who were killed in the very same place, over 100 years ago

Griffin was originally approached about the residency due to the links between Northern France and his native Black Country, a region of the West Midlands in the UK, both in terms of landscape and an industrial history. Upon visiting Béthune, Griffin was greatly moved and disturbed by the number of casualties on the Western Front in World War I– over one million during the Battle of the Somme, close to Béthune where the British suffered the greatest number of casualties in a single day in the history of the British Army.

The result is a postmodern ode; anchored in the farmland of France and replaying the trench elsewhere. The book is divided into several chapters of fictional storytelling and explores the relationship to the body, industry and ultimately, to war. The most recent photographs in the book were taken in 2017 and journey across diverse locations from the McCain factory to the battlefields of the past, including an RAF base in the UK and the City of London. These new photographs often echo and link to Griffin’s previous projects which are featured later, including his Broadgate commission of 1986, ‘Sliced Bread’ featuring photographs and office dances drawn from his archives of photographing management and bureaucracy in the 1970s and 1980s for Management Today magazine. The titles of each chapter are cryptic, for example ‘Welcome to Twin Peaks’, ‘The Protagonists’, ‘Where Have All the Young Men Gone’, ‘Sleepwalkers’ and ‘Tools of the Trade’. Valentine Umansky, the exhibition curator, describes the project as being like a game of Cluedo – clues are given but nothing is fully revealed in this post-modern, satirical project exploring themes of class, work, war and soil.

The exhibition ‘Between Here and Nowhere’, curated by Valentine Umansky, will be on display at Labanque Arts Centre in Béthune from 17 March – 15 July 2018.

Publisher:  the Eriskay Connection, 2021
Language: English, Dutch

​Photography: Peter Dekens
Design: Rob van Hoesel
Lythography: Rob van Hoesel

Peter Dekens’ earliest memory of the First World War dates back to 1979, aged 12. One of his cousins found an old, unexploded bombshell and tried to dismantle it. The explosive went off and he succumbed to his injuries later that same evening.
Driving along the former front line in Ypres (Belgium) now it’s nearly impossible to imagine that one of the most horrific wars of all time was waged here one hundred years ago.

The traces of the Great War have been almost completely erased from the landscape, over the course of decades, hundreds of bunkers were removed. To this very day, human remains and projectiles are still found every time someone sticks a spade into the soil. Somewhere beneath the sod, tens of thousands of missing soldiers are presumed to lie undiscovered, along with hundreds of thousands of unexploded shells.
An estimated thirty per cent of the 1.5 billion bombshells fired during the First World War never went off. Some of the people who live in the area have developed a sixth sense for this hidden history: where tens of thousands of tourists and travellers pass by unknowing, the locals know that the slightest raise or dip in the road could be an indication that war remnants still lie uneasy beneath the earth.

For centuries, Europe was a divided continent with countless wars and infinite redefinitions of shared borders. It briefly seemed as though the First World War would be the very last, the “war to end all wars”. Ultimately, however, those years planted the first seeds of the Second World War. Long-lasting peace, prosperity and progress did not come to Europe until after 1945. The establishment of the European Community was envisioned as an affirmation of permanent peace in Europe. With the recent situation surrounding Brexit and the surge in nationalist, anti-European movements in various European countries, it seems that the awareness of the importance of unity stands on shaky ground again. The traces of a history of war seem to be fading rapidly from memory.

Publisher: Polygon, 2018
Language: English, French and German

​Photography: Donald Weber
Text: Larry Frolick, Kevin Robbie and Donald Weber
Design: Teun van der Heijden, Heijdens Karwei
Separations: Sebastiaan Hanekroot, Colour & Books

In this visionary collection of images, texts, and scientific data, photographer Donald Weber and his colleagues investigate the beaches of D-Day using the latest techniques of forensic analysis. What they find is something far larger than its microscopic constituents: War isn’t just a defining feature of our collective experience, but a quantum event, as well.
The war-relics presented here offer an immersive narrative on the theme of social memory. The assembled D-Day artifacts include WWII spy-craft and old Hollywood movies, dioramas and drone-mounted cameras, private post-war memoirs and wistful seaside photographs. They reveal our civilization’s longing for a final victory over death.
War Sand seeks a great truth: What is history? And what does it mean to us, its creators and survivors?

Composed by tre volumes
Memory Trace
Independence | Nakba
Desert Bloom

Publisher: Steidl
Language: English / Arabic / Hebrew

Photography: Fazal Sheikh
Text: Fazal Sheikh
Book Design: Fazal Sheikh with Duncan White/Steidl Design

The Erasure Trilogy explores the anguish caused by the loss of memory—by forgetting, amnesia or suppression—and the resulting human desire to preserve memory, all seen through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Memory Trace, the first book in the trilogy, depicts the ruins caused by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948: portraits of those traumatized by violence, devastated landscapes and fragments of buildings. This visual poem suggests the irreparable loss of a lingering past that augurs a painful and diffi cult future. Tracing the ironic consequences of David Ben-Gurion’s dream of settling the Negev and making the “desert bloom,” the aerial photographs in Sheikh’s Desert Bloom reveal the myriad actions that have displaced and erased the Bedouins who have lived in the desert for generations. Here we see the extreme transformation of the landscape through erosion, mining, military training camps, the demolition of villages and afforestation. Through Sheikh’s lens the desert becomes both an archive of violence and a record of human attempts to erase it.

Independence | Nakba consists of sixty-six diptychs — one for each year since 1948 — pairing people from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of gradually increasing age. The double portraits query the relations between Israelis and Palestinians before the founding of the Israeli State (each image depicts either someone who lived in Palestine before the founding of the Israeli State, or someone whose ancestors did).

Desert Bloom Notes, the essential companion reader to Desert Bloom, explores the historical and contemporary clues along the shifting surface of the desert, and what lies hidden, sealed within Sheikh’s aerial landscapes of the Negev.

Publisher: Ivorypress, 2014
Language: English

​Photography: Chloe Dewe Mathews
Text: Geoff Dyer, Sir Hew Strachan and Dr. Helen McCartney

This book is published in association with the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford.

Produced over the eighteen month period leading up to the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Shot at Dawn is a new body of work by the British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews that focuses on the sites at which British, French and Belgian troops were executed for cowardice and desertion between 1914 and 1918. The project comprises images of the locations at which individuals were shot or held in the period leading up to their executions and all were taken as close to the exact time of execution as possible and at approximately the same time of year.

The book provides a complete visual record of Shot at Dawn. It also contains a critical analysis of the work by the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer and expert contextual essays on cowardice, desertion and psychological trauma brought on by military service by the acclaimed historians Sir Hew Strachan and Dr Helen McCartney.