Memory Traces

    MEMORY is the Subject, TRACES - LANDSCAPE - the Form

The idea for the project Memory Traces developed during the Snelweg project. I would come home late from traveling the country photographing highways, cook a quick meal and seat myself in front of the tv watching the news while eating. Not a smart idea..
Scared people, running and hiding behind walls or strategically placed containers in city streets were being shot at from the surrounding hills by invisible snipers. Sometimes a person - real, like me - would collapse, hit by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, without a sound or echo to be heard. Bystanders would then try to carry the body out of the danger zone. The surrealism of this happening in Sarajevo, just a couple of hours away from my comfort-zone, was depressing. Not long before I had seen a documentary by BBC Horizon called Inside Chernobyl Sarcophagus which had a similar impact on me. Human robots as they cynically were called were seen trying to contain the damage of this self-inflicted catastrophe resulting in an imploded nuclear power-plant spreading radio-activity all over Europe. 

The pieces fell together. Landscapes representing fragments of our destructive, arrogant and wasteful culture would become my new project. I wanted to visit and see the places which during my lifetime had formed my thoughts about the culture I was living in. Being from the atomic generation I soon decided that it all started with the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.

Between 1997 and 2001 I photographed in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan), Berlin, Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Ronneburg (Germany), Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands), Chernobyl (Ukraine), Khe San and My Lai (Vietnam). 

During the project I found that I needed more ways to express my complex feelings. It resulted in a short story, combined with a selection of travelogues I kept during my travels. Later I added a couple of 'written' photographs, texts evoking a way of looking at a photograph still in full movement, still alive.

On my trip to Chernobyl I found a roll of negatives in a looted house in the vicinity of the reactor. I printed these abandoned family photographs and designed a small family-album to represent civilians who always are the victims of these human-induced tragedies. 

Memory Traces was designed by Irma Boom. It was selected as one of Photo-Eye's best 2009 Photobooks and is included in The Dutch Photobook (NAi Publishers/Aperture, 2012) as one of the 124 seminal Dutch Photobooks since 1945.

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