Hannah Arendt, defending human plurality, writes, “the supreme crime it (the court) was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people.” This serves as the point of departure of “All Things Human Subject to Categories: A Photo Series,” the idea of which is to exhibit sites of genocide on our own bodies as a recognition of human plurality.

 

I have no intention of offending anyone with this project even though it’s naïve to say so. I have no intention of commodifying the Holocaust (although these prints are for sale to help me afford the completion of this series) nor would I want to simply present trauma in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This project came about as a result of my academic interests and years of studying the history of camps. It also arose from my desire to photographically catalogue sites of genocide as sites of remembrance. I want to understand the tendency toward preserving and reconstructing sites of genocide. It is important to note that these images are not representing trauma but are meant to be representations of memories of trauma; they are not representations of trauma but representation of an imitation of trauma.     

 

[These pieces are composites of 35mm and medium format scanned film of Auschwitz taken in 2012 and portraits of backs taken in 2014. This a work in progress; the photographs of Auschwitz are the first installment in this series.]