Images and Words: An Online History of Photography

Hirsch’s project will be featured in “War Machines” an exhibition curated by Wim Melis that also includes work by Gabriel Jones (US), Shunkichi Kikuchi (Magnum), Simon Norfolk (GB), Simon Roberts (US), Paul Shambroom (US), P.W. Voigt (DE),
and Yosuke Yamahata (Magnum).

In an ambitious and probing photo festival Noorderlicht curator Wim Melis and five guest curators offer their views on themes that define the human condition. Stuart Franklin, Lauren Heinz, Simon Njami, Marc Prüst and Bas Vroege take us with them to conflict areas, and provide their commentary on developments in the vanguard of engaged, narrative documentary photography. On the basis of weaponry Melis underscores the absurdity of war. Six diverse exhibitions, but one powerful thread: the love and the horrors of which man is capable; the struggles that remain hidden from the eyes of the world. Thus Noorderlicht deliberately turns the spotlight on the footnotes of world history, on ordinary people and their circumstances, their will to live and their capacity to destroy.”

For details visit:

Unseen Terror: The Bomb, Other Bogeymen, and a Culture of Fear
or
www.noorderlicht.com

Following an aesthetic strategy of search and discovery, World in a Jar: War & Trauma utilizes the camera as a cultural tool to curate and re-imagine key components from historical and original images to explore the workings of our collective societal memory involving loss, popular culture, religion, tragedy, and the nature of evil over the past four centuries.

Using the Shoah as it point of departure, World in a Jar is a free-form sculptural montage that rethinks the customary linear narrative by offering a supermarket of moveable images. The original installation consisted of 850 individual image jars, each one serving as an interchangeable viewing block, allowing it to be a perpetual work in progress that recreates itself each time it is installed. This permits each photograph to not only present its own split-second historical reference, but also informs the context and interpretation of the surrounding images. There are no captions to anchor the images to particular events, which allows the images to transcend their specific time-based circumstances. Rather, images freely float in an ambiguous and enigmatic space, encouraging viewers to interact and expand meanings based on their own experiences. This engagement is a reminder how photographs continue to seduce us into believing that they are objective records, when in fact all images are not what they initially appear to be and require thoughtful interpretation. This open-ended production, emulating how the puzzles and paradoxes of our own memories are constructed, can convey an endless tale about the human condition that exists outside of chronological time.