On Memory from the series Heimat Land Narratives 

The series of photographs of landscapes seek to document what remains of the past. The photographs, taken in the US are a response to, rather than a narration of, history. In the past three years I have been interested in what has happened when Germans occupied a landscape: living, working, marching, killing, dying, or surviving within the context of human experiences. For my work in Massachusetts and New Hampshire I have focused on former German prisoner of war camps at Ft. Devens, Camp Edwards, Stark, NH, and surrounding areas where prisoners were put to work during their imprisonment.

As a German, national identity has often been shaped by our sense of cultural heritage only, such as architectural monuments, the arts, social custom, and other public expressions of German character. However, in past decades since the war, there has been an effort to acknowledge the reality of our collective guilt and experiences in the post war period through a process of storing and categorizing facts in museums, archives, books, and films. But what is our understanding today of the individual experiences of anyone who goes through war? Do we truly understand, collectively, what it means to the individual to be perpetrator, victim, or both?        

The limitations of preservation in the end are also the limitation of the photograph; its inability to fully describe, capture or narrate emphasizes the absence of what might otherwise be identified. Often, it is what we cannot see that perpetuates our desire to understand. We desperately seek to understand by looking intensely, by penetrating the image, thinking, eventually we will see and we will understand. The potential of recognition is why these photographs were made.