On European Ground.

Photographs by Alan Cohen 

Essays by Sander L. Oilman and Jonathan Bordo

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)

In the Latin treatise on the art of memory, Ad Herennium (86-82 BC), the anonymous author emphasized the importance of places and images as mental triggers for things to be remembered Alan Cohen's black and white photographs from the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps and the broken streets of Berlin share some principles with this classical mnemonics Just as the Greeks saw the art of memory as an inner writing, Cohens photographs aspire to a common metaphoric expression that embraces the form and meaning of his omnipresent subject matter--history.

In On European Ground, both his photographs and the traces they cover are found to share the embodiment of a palimpsest where history has been inscribed and erased, then deposited in silver and noted, only to recede beyond our grasp once more. Photographed in a minimalist and abstract manner, the elusive ground referred to in the title has been reduced to tablets of formalist modernism that obviously fail to recuperate the redemption they promise. The insistent problem is not only the irretrievability of the past marked in those spaces or their final decline into dust, but rather the viewer's obligation to recognize them as portals to an elusive history behind or within them. The mystery produced in the chasm between these banal surfaces and their notable markers--contained in captions such as Somme, Auschwitz, Berlin, etc--becomes no more than a carefully mapped out surprise that assures the effectiveness of the rhetoric but seems to lack purpose in its redundant delivery. As in many nineteenth-century Europ ean photographs of Egypt and Palestine, the romantic image erected by preserved ruins is linked to an archaic gesture of melancholy performed to halt passing. But, as history has repeatedly shown, innocent elegies for the dissipating past frequently become the malleable tools for an epistemological and ideological practice that, in turn, brands a specific lineage. With this return of events, the formal silence curtailed by Cohen's photographs resonates with an echo that we have all been conditioned to recognize. If there is an enduring legacy in these events--milestones that fit our descriptions but still escape our comprehension--it must be the stranglehold ideology exerted on individual human beings in the performance of unspeakable acts. With every insistent call to remember, there is also an attendant demand to forget, and the somber ground of memory must perhaps recall its images to proceed, but preferably discard the captions when they seem inevitable. In the overtly telling juxtapositions arranged by C ohen, a didactic link once more threatens to overwhelm the individual with a sense of destiny. As the Holocaust plays the multiplexes and is reincarnated in new media, it also seems pertinent to remember those emphatic pacts with the dead enacted in singular minutes of silence. Perhaps the time has come to multiply this full circle with the number of lives lost or taken on European ground and let the ensuing period of respectful contemplation last for eternity?

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