RAW: Releasing the Artist Within

My version of a Shimon Attie image.


By Shimon Attie

I really enjoyed the social history of photography class I took this semester. One of our assignments was to "become" the photographer we randomly drew from an envelope. I had to create an image in his style, give a presentation and write a paper on my artist. Enjoy!

Shimon Attie is more than just a photographer; he is also a historian who transitions between public art, installation art, performance and new media. He is mainly concerned with finding historical photographs from marginalized and forgotten communities and then visually introducing these memories by projecting the images onto the present physical landscape. Attie once described his work as “a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath” (1).
Shimon Attie moved to Berlin in 1991 and completed The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter project in 1993. Attie was born in California but his mother’s family is from Germany and his father’s family is from Syria. The project started out as self reflection for Attie who said that he found himself "walking the streets, looking everywhere and urgently asking myself, `Where are the missing people? What happened to them? Where did they go?' '' (Axelrod 1). He began projecting fragments of photographs of Jews prior to World War ll onto buildings in East Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. He attempted to match the photograph with the present physical location. In many cases the original buildings had been bombed during the war or torn down. Attie had trouble finding the sites due to the renaming and numbering of streets after the war. About 25% of the images from this project were projected onto the original site; others were taken on the same street or in an artistically pleasing location close by (Attie 10).
The Berlin installations were visible for one or two evenings at each location and could be seen by residents and street traffic. If Attie’s goal was to help people to remember the past he may have realized it in Berlin. Attie reported several passersby were fascinated by his projections and one man responded emotionally by relating the story of his grandfather (whom he’d never known) who was deported to Auschwitz. Others had adverse reactions to the projections. One man called the police, believing that the projection on his building might cause his neighbors to think he was Jewish (Attie 12). It is clear that the re-placing of a specific lost memory; right onto the surface of present day Berlin can cause emotions to intensify even 60 years after the fact.
In order to preserve the projections and the memories they evoked, Attie photographed them. It is clear that he has a flare for color and composition. The camera angle is carefully chosen to include a broad view of the buildings and sometimes the surrounding area. The camera angle often accentuates the cross pattern present in many of the windows in East Berlin. In many cases the camera angle in combination with the slide projector angle make the images come to life. Jews appear to be casually walking down the street or standing in their doorways. With color film he used long exposures (3 to 4 minutes) to create eerie yet colorful nighttime photographs. In many cases there are multiple photographs being projected onto a building and the projections are sometimes tinted blue, sepia, purple or green. In some cases Attie captures the lights from a passing motor vehicle or bicycle adding more color and presence to his photographs. It is interesting to note that Attie could have combined the pre Holocaust images of Jews and the present day landscapes in the darkroom or with a computer, yet he chose not to. Attie explained, “I wanted to touch those spaces” (Axelrod 2).
Attie is disturbed by the "passive anti-Semitism" he experienced in present day Germany; he explained "It's similar to Native Americans in the U.S. -- first you commit genocide and then the few survivors become exotic and trendy" (Axelrod 3). The sentiment that Attie expressed makes his work about much more than just art; his images are really statements that apply to nations all over the world. The images start to become reminders of not only of the holocaust, but for various groups of people who have been harmed in recent history. Sadly, Attie’s images will probably never become outdated; 15 years after Attie’s The Writing on the Wall project, genocide occurs across Africa and rages on in Darfur, while the world looks on.
Shimon Attie has gone on to complete many other projects and he continues to incorporate the same themes throughout his work. In 1998 he released another book titled Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs. In 2001 he moved to Rome to work on The History of Another. He again chose to project pieces of historical photographs of Roman Jews onto a modern Roman landscape. Once again bringing history and memory to the surface and visually placing the memories onto the surfaces of the surrounding landscape.
He moved to New York in 1996 and soon after completed another project called Between Dreams and History. For this project he collected writing samples from immigrants who wrote down their private memories and recollections. He then used lasers to project the writings onto the architecture in the Lower East Side, one letter at a time. His current project The Attraction of Onlookers, Aberfan: an Anatomy of a Welsh Village deals with the 1966 coal mining disaster in which an elementary school building was destroyed and 144 people were killed, 116 of them children. Attie again chose to use installations and still photographs to symbolize the futures of residents who are still affected by the tragedy. He exposes the identities of those who died in the accident and gives them a presence, and at the same time he brings home the reality of how survivors have been affected in the wake of the aftermath.
In all of Attie’s projects he uses photographs or words to project a memory, a specific time, a long lost time, right onto the surface of our modern world; a world that has long since moved on and doesn’t want to be reminded of an unsavory past. Attie forces us to connect the memories to the present; reminding us of our histories and our identities. I will quote Saul Friedlander, a Pulitzer Prize winning Jewish historian that lived in France during the German occupation, survived and is currently a Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles; “When knowledge comes, memory comes too, little by little. Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” (Bernstein 347)