Memory Traces

The idea for the project Memory Traces  developed during the Snelweg project. I would come home late from photographing highways, cook a quick meal and seat myself in front of the tv watching the news while eating. Not a good idea..
Scared people, running and hiding behind walls or strategically placed containers in city streets, carrying water-containers or bags of food, were being shot at by invisible snipers from the surrounding hills. Sometimes a person - real, like me - would collapse, hit by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel, without a sound or echo to be heard. Bystanders would then try to carry the body out of the danger zone.  The surrealism of this happening not somewhere far away but in Sarajevo, just a couple of hours from my comfort-zone, was utterly depressing. Not so long before I had seen a BBC Horizon documentary called Inside Chernobyl Sarcophagus which had a similar impact on me. Human robots

as they cynically were called trying to contain the damage of this self-inflicted catastrophe resulting in an imploded nuclear power-plant spreading radio-activity all over Europe. 

The pieces fell together. Landscapes representing fragments of our destructive, arrogant and wasteful culture would become my new project. I wanted to visit and see the places which during my lifetime had formed my thoughts about the culture I was living in. Being from the atomic generation I soon decided that it all started with the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945.



Between 1997 and 2001 I photographed in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan), Berlin, Bitterfeld-Wolfen and Ronneburg (Germany), Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands), Chernobyl (Ukraine), Khe San and My Lai (Vietnam). 

During the project I found that I needed more ways to express my feelings which resulted in a short story, combined with a selection of travelogues I kept during my travels. Later I added a couple written photographs, texts evoking a way of looking at a photograph still in full movement, still alive.

On my trip to Chernobyl I found a roll of negatives in a looted house in the vicinity of the reactor. I printed these abandoned family photographs and designed a small family-album to represent the civilians who always are victims of these human-induced tragedies. 

Memory Traces was designed by Irma Boom. It was selected as one of Photo-Eye's best 2009 Photobooks and included in The Dutch Photobook (NAi Publishers/Aperture, 2012) as one of the 124 seminal Dutch Photobooks since 1945.

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