Jim Lommasson
We often think about war and its aftermath, as though there were a clear demarcation between the two. Few ponder the tectonic forces, the signs and omens that portend the end of an era. In Berlin in the 1930's photographer Roman Vishniac saw the war looming, and urgently began to document a way of life on the verge of extinction.
He wrote, "I was living in Germany in the thirties, and I knew that Hitler had made it his mission to exterminate all Jews, especially the children and the women who could bear children in the future. I was unable to save my people, only their memory."
Memory.
My recent projects, Exit Wounds: Soldiers' Stories - Life after Iraq and Afghanistan; What We Carried: Fragments and Memories from the Cradle of Civilization; and Stories of Survival: Object - Image - Memory, have been driven by a desire to give participants a platform to tell their stories. The stories speak to much more than the object.
Stories of Survival is a collaborative photography and storytelling project with genocide and Holocaust survivors who fled to safety in the U.S. It centers on objects they were able carry with them on perilous journeys. From my photograph of the object, the participant responded with a story, a memory, a poem or a drawing. Ordinary objects become sacred objects. The luminous inner life of these ordinary things is a testament to the unspeakable anguish of a life left forever behind.
In 2016, I began working with Holocaust and genocide survivors. The project include objects and stories from genocide in Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and South Sudan, and the Holocaust. Stories of Survival asks "What would you take with you? What would you leave behind?"
Roman Vishniac's impulse to photograph what he saw on the horizon in Europe was prescient. It's clear to me that the currents of hate and bigotry still run strong. Stories of Survival memorializes those lost and those who survived, but it is also a call to action. (Sorry to be preachy).