Picturing Personal History: Sylvia de Swaan’s Return: The Landscape of Memory
Our concern with history…is a concern with preformed images already imprinted in our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered. — W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
How does one recollect a past that exists in sparse fragments? How does one begin to see and understand their own personal history — and that of one’s family — against the backdrop of an infamous genocide whose historical arc overshadows and encompasses millions of such stories? As a visual artist trying to describe their connection to this history, how does one work with material that isn’t there: the invisible, the unsaid, the unknown? And finally: how does one ever reconcile what sense they have made of their story, of those facts retrieved, re-collected and re-interpreted, with all of those other facts and individual tellings that they were never aware of and will never have access to? Is reconciling one’s truth with another’s even necessary, or the point? What does it mean to make up one’s own history as you go along?
Like the eponymous protagonist in W.G. Sebald’s masterwork Austerlitz, Sylvia de Swaan has kept appointments with the past, exploring personal interiority and history alongside a collectively experienced exterior reality. “Return: The Landscape of Memory,” exemplifies her process of engaging and transforming multiple narratives beyond both literal and imagined histories, working and re-working these over a period of decades.
Romanian-born and Jewish, de Swaan and her family were displaced and scattered throughout Eastern Europe’s refugee camps after WWII, and her mother, sister, maternal grandparents and she immigrated to the U.S. in 1951. Describing her arrival to America in that chaotic time, she discusses the few artifacts from their previous lives that served as the original DNA to the photographic project she would embark upon forty years later:
Some histories get irrevocably lost in the avalanche of war — the family tree uprooted, the branches scattered to the four winds. When my mother, sister and I arrived as stateless refugees in New York Harbor in 1951 we had only what we could carry — among which was a small wood and cloth suitcase, that we called “the rentzele (yiddish for little suitcase).” My mother managed to hang on to it all the way from our hometown in Northern Romania, through deportations, ghettos, concentration camps, refugee camps, and across the Atlantic Ocean on an American army ship to our new life. It contained birth certificates, marriage papers, a few family photos, a few valuables, all cleverly tucked away under a false bottom and hidden compartments that passed through multiple inspections undetected. It was the repository of all we had left of our family history and has served as the original context for this work.
“Return” weaves together the fragments of personal history within the larger fabric of the now collectively understood history of WWII’s holocaust. She has retraced the routes her family traversed as “displaced” persons throughout the period of the war, as well as found a generous community of strangers that share these histories and experiences and, in sharing those details with her, have further informed the more tangible and tactile gaps in her personal historiography, which in turn manifests itself as quiet revelations through her images.
There are certain recurrences we can count in de Swaan’s images and the miniature stories she gives us; among them are the ubiquity of hands and the depiction of modes of travel — airplanes and passenger trains, most notably. The former lends itself to an intimate contemplativeness: hands that are grasping, hands that are holding some unseen occurrence at bay, hands that are held against the windows of passenger trains or airplanes, hands that are gingerly — reverentially, even — holding a small family photograph up to the light to be better seen. These are the places where de Swaan has either inserted herself as herself into a re-imagined narrative, or one where she is a a stand-in actor for a re-enacted scene that happened to her or members of her family. The other recurrence, that of transportation, depicts the comings and goings of a protagonist that both is and is not us. It is shown variously as a yawning opening re-imagining our sense of vistas and possibilities outward beyond any truly visible horizon line; it is a voyeuristic vastness that has us both wondering and wishing for something private and unarticulated.
Recently de Swaan has taken to displaying these images as diptychs, citing an influence of the narrative power of cinema and a desire to unite images and tell stories through her photographs in this way. When images are paired with one another, the viewer is forced to imagine or create connections between the two often disparate ones, reading a deeper meaning in the mirroring. That said, there are several powerful stand-alone images from this body of work, images that I would argue would be diluted of their power if split between their vision and meaning when paired with another. One such image, “War Games,” which shows a hand holding a toy military jet against the skyline of an actual train yard with stationary and departing trains, recalls Josef Koudelka’s famous image from the Prague 1968 invasion, where a hand wearing a watch marking the exact moment of the invasion juts out from the left of the frame, acting as an underline against the vista of the city, cobblestones, tram lines and historic buildings in a line of sight all the way through the picture plane. In another, “Baltic Express Sleepers,” she has captured a row of unconscious, but charmingly overly familiar with one another, passengers as they lay sprawled, mouths agape or heads hooded by jackets in an attempt at blocking out sound or light. In terms of this image appearing within the context of the rest of her work, the easy camaraderie of these three travelers contrasts menacingly with other images de Swaan gives us of train travel, as well as our knowledge of how holocaust victims were transported between ghettos and concentration camps, the discrepancy here dawning on us as both an observation and a judgement.
In an interview, de Swaan notes that with “Return” she is, “…also seeking to abstract from my personal story to encompass the collective history of the region and beyond — to reference our present world situation, when there are increasing numbers of wars, massacres and displaced people who are losing everything, history repeating itself over and over again.” Certainly this political moment does speak to displacement of immigrant populations, of the many cruel instances of stateless exile for those who have either built lives or sought better ones here. However, this modestly articulated desire of de Swaan’s presses the question: is it possible to describe and situate a personal narrative of a family’s experience of the holocaust in good faith alongside our contemporary tragedies of war, diaspora and mass genocide? The story de Swaan tells us has been so thoroughly historicized, eulogized and closely examined — by writers, artists, filmmakers — over a period of decades and across multiple generations. Do current global atrocities such as the war and refugee crisis in Syria or the sectarian civil wars in West Africa, for example, attract the same level of scrutiny and, importantly, a receptive audience for such? Or is it the case that such historical moments need the distance of time and generations to be viewed closely or clearly, to be made sense of or to attempt to make sense of them? Do we understand collective pain any better by comparing it to other pains? What is it to tell a story to an audience of a hundred, a thousand or a million receptive listeners, versus telling a different sort of story to a comparatively empty room? What if we only want to hear the stories we are familiar with, those whose lessons now seem sacrosanct, the ones we tell ourselves we have learned well enough to never repeat? How does one bring along the large, empathetic audience of the well-known story, and create the conditions for that same empathy for all of the other stories that need to be heard? These are the questions de Swaan’s project raises for me; these are the questions that many image makers are still searching for the answers to.
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