Alive and Destroyed

Description:


The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation. For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled with the afterlife of the genocide, creating a large number of photoworks and essays, including extensive work with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland. At the center of his work work has been his long-term project Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time, begun in 2010. With a large format camera and antique lenses, Jason Francisco has undertaken a series of deep journeys extending from Berlin in the west to Kharkov in the east, Riga in the north to Bucharest in the south—for the sake of images that might carry the complications of remembering and forgetting in the places where the events we collectively call the Holocaust occurred. His destinations included the notorious sites of the genocide, such as Auschwitz and the ghettos of Warsaw and Łódź, which often are taken to stand for the whole. And has made his way to hundreds of small, often remote concentrationary sites in Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Hungary and Slovakia—massacre sites in forests, fields, riverbanks and cemeteries, deportation routes, subcamps, labor camps, transit camps, short-term ghettoes, escape routes, hiding places, not to mention countless sites of erstwhile Jewish life and civilization, some intact, more in ruins, vastly more in states of nothingness. Jason Francisco's decentralized approach follows recent scholarship, which has identified more t