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Photographic journey through the past and present of history

2021-02-25T01:01:17.426Z


Two books take as their theme the experience of the trip, one through the United States and the other through Europe, to delve into topics such as racism and migratory processes


Photograph of Amani Willet included in the photobook 'A Parallel Road' Amani Willett

Every pleasure trip is largely made up of dreams.

As were those of those African Americans who in the middle of the last century enthusiastically celebrated the construction of the interstate highway system in the United States: 66,000 kilometers of new highways on which one of the great rites of America, the

road trip, would take place

.

However, not everyone was equally welcome to that experience.

The road always had, and still has, more obstacles for blacks, within a country that proclaims itself free and democratic.

PHOTO GALLERY: Paths of no return

A Parallel Road

(

Overlapse) is the third photobook by Amani Willett (Dar es Salamm, Tanzania, 1975).

Its small size emulates the dimensions of

The Negro Motorist Green Book,

a guide published by Victor Hugo Green, a postman from the New York neighborhood of Harlem who for three decades, from 1936 to 1966, provided information to African Americans about accommodations, restaurants or gas stations where they would be well received along their journey by road.

“Separate but equal”, the so-called Jim Crow laws were then enacted.

That publication fell into Willett's hands a decade ago and became one of the great pillars of this new book.

At that time, he was working on another of his projects,

Underground Railroad,

for which he documented the forgotten towns that once served as stops within a secret network of routes that led runaway slaves to freedom.

"One hundred years later, the mobility of black people was still a problem," says Willett, who began to investigate the places mentioned in the manual with the idea of ​​photographing them.

He soon found that he was not so interested in the places themselves as in the psychological experience of driving through America as a black man.

Willett thus began to shape his new publication by repeating a formula already used successfully in his previous photobook,

The Dissapearance of Joseph Plummer,

where history is intertwined with the present, making use of archival materials together with his own images, as well as well as vernacular photography (in this case it comes from the archives of his family, which gives the project a much more intimate character).

Images between which a dialogue is established from which meanings emerge that remained hidden.

The book begins with the innocent and carefree tone of the beginning of a happy adventure.

On a background made up of maps, the author's relatives pose next to their cars.

In between the colorful illustrations of others who take a parallel path, the white ones, are interspersed.

Soon everything turns black.

Tire tracks on the asphalt alert us to what is to come.

The road has turned dark.

The reality of the American dream begins to emerge.

A car appears overturned in a ditch.

A police officer points his gun at the car of Ryan Twyman, the young man who was shot in a parking lot in 2019. The boy, 24, was unarmed.

A part of a car is stained red on a black background: it refers to insecurity, fear, violence, and also death.

Thus, the road becomes a representation of a collective trauma.

An illustration made up of names printed in white alludes to the thousands of African-American victims killed on the road in violent conditions.

“Too many.

So many that they have ceased to be individuals to become a figure ”, highlights the author.

“Violence against black Americans has become more visible in the past decade thanks to social media.

We all knew it existed, but seeing it in images is different.

The images still retain some power, ”Willett emphasizes.

“This can be a double-edged sword, we have become used to seeing more images of explicit violence against the black race than against the white race, which also exists.

Hence, when composing this book, I was wondering where to draw a line, where to put the emphasis so that it was constructive and that it was not traumatizing for the black race ”.

Travel to the past through the borders of the present

In the same way that

A Parallel Road

alludes to a personal issue to address universal issues, such as racism or violence, in

45

(MACK) Damian Heinisch (Zabrze, Poland, 1968)

He draws on an episode in his family's history, at the end of the Second World War, to address the issue of deportation and immigration processes.

An emotional and intimate introspective exercise, developed along a journey, which won the First Book Award last year, which the British publisher awards annually to authors who have not previously published a book.

A sense of displacement, as well as continuity, takes hold of the reader from the first pages.

The drastic way in which the images are cut and their grainy quality contribute to this.

There are elements that are repeated: railway poles, tracks, wagons, women saying goodbye from a window.

However, it is not until the end of the book that the reader discovers, through a text and a poster-size image, that the photographs have been taken through the window of a train.

The author traces his family history from Ukraine to Oslo.

Its starting point is the city of Debaltzevo.

There his grandfather died.

Deported to a prison camp along with thousands of men from Upper Silesia, as a result of the Yalta Conference, he left behind his wife and four children in Gleiwitz, then Germany.

For ten months he kept a diary in tiny print on a calendar.

Where he is buried is still unknown.

After years of a tough existential struggle aggravated by the scourge of unemployment, in 1978 the photographer's father decided to start a new life in Essen, West Germany.

In the company of his family he leaves his hometown (annexed to Poland, now known as Gliwice).

The journey ends in Oslo, where the artist took up residence a decade ago.

The author returns to these places on a journey in reverse of the one where the photobook is finally shown.

From Oslo to Ukraine, you will document the changing landscape of Europe during the four seasons of the year.

A Europe that seems to have healed its wounds.

Only in appearance, since eight months after the end of the journey the conflict resurfaces in Donetsk.

Upon his return from this cathartic journey, the author shapes the publication.

Images are matched intuitively, with associations dictated by memory.

They show urban landscapes through which the author delves into “the soul of the individuals” that populate them.

"It is both a physical journey and a regression through memory," he says.

Each image is associated with a number that appears at the bottom of the page and refers to the distance in kilometers between Oslo and the place where the image was taken.

"The idea of ​​incorporating numbers came as an allusion to those with whom men are identified within prison camps," he says.

The title of the book also refers to the symbolism that the number 45 acquires during the development of the project.

In 1945 his grandfather died and the war ended.

“I discovered that in the three trips, my grandfather, my father and I were the same age, 45 years old.

This gave another turn to the project, since I was able to identify more with their destinations ", adds the photographer.

"Although the subject of the book is very personal, it is made up of images in which everyone can be recognized."

There is no reference to time in the pictures.

Immersed in this timelessness, the reader makes the story his own.

To Parallel Road.

Amani Willett.

Overlapse Photobooks.

112 pages.

24 euros.

45

.

Damian Heinisch.

MACK Books.

190 pages.

30 euros.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-02-25

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