1:1 Photo Magazine

Living in Germany has radically disoriented me. Like the images I make, it’s created a kind of temporal confusion in my life. Things may appear familiar and “okay” but a closer look will reveal something completely different.

This country has both challenged me and threatened me. It’s brought out the best in me and the worst. It’s illuminated the positive attributes of human beings struggling with memory and identity. And I’ve also experienced the places here where the very worst in humanity was revealed.

The dark landscape, the cold stares, the bellowing smoke stacks, and the indifference that permeates a lot of the culture are difficult things to understand when seen through my eyes and processed with my mind.

The images that I’ve made reflect these feelings and emotions in a very subjective way; however, the connection to humanity is universal. Every human being has felt the pain of rejection or the sting of being different and not fitting in. My only intent for these photographs is to allow the viewer to see, symbolically, “the other”, and the “perpetrator” both in the faces and in the landscape.

I feel a lot like William Faulkner when he wrote, “Past isn’t dead. It is not even past.” Nowhere else are those words more true than in Germany. The past is alive and well and it thrives on the indifference of cultures that are embittered and hardened by it.

Germany has revealed everything Jewish in me. It’s helped me identify with my heritage and it’s made me very proud of my heritage, too. In more ways than one, the title of this work is as much about my struggle to come to terms with the past, and to understand it, as it is about the German’s struggle. I hope these images can be a catalyst for discourse on this topic.

Nie wieder.