Alive and Destroyed

The Holocaust as history ended seventy-five years ago, about the span of a full human life; the Holocaust as culture is very much of the present, its meanings and lessons still actively in formation.

For twenty-five years, Jason Francisco has wrestled with the afterlife of the genocide, creating a large number of photoworks and essays, including extensive work with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków, Poland. At the centre of his work has been his long-term project Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time, begun in 2010.

With a large format camera and antique lenses, Jason Francisco has undertaken a series of deep journeys extending from Berlin in the west to Kharkov in the east, Riga in the north to Bucharest in the south—for the sake of images that might carry the complexities of remembering and forgetting in the places where the events we collectively call the Holocaust occurred. His destinations included the notorious sites of the genocide, such as Auschwitz and the ghettos of Warsaw and Łódź, which often are taken to stand for the whole.

He has made his way to hundreds of small, often remote concentrationary sites in Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Hungary, and Slovakia—massacre sites in forests, fields, riverbanks, and cemeteries, deportation routes, subcamps, labour camps, transit camps, short-term ghettos, escape routes, hiding places, not to mention countless sites of erstwhile Jewish life and civilisation, some intact, more in ruins, vastly more in states of nothingness.

Jason Francisco's decentralised approach follows recent scholarship, which has identified more than 42,500 locations in Nazi-occupied Europe where the Holocaust was perpetrated: venturing into the physical geography of the genocide, venturing into the territory of remembrance and forgetting, and searching for an image form that might carry and register what he found and felt. In its method and form, Alive and Destroyed is an unconventional work of witness.

Documentary in spirit and conceptualist in method, it does not use photography to "capture" the worlds that the Holocaust left behind—to use the most common metaphor for the photographic act, itself reflecting a carceral understanding of photography as a medium. Rather, Alive and Destroyed draws on the capacities of photography to test and redefine what we mean by presence and absence in memory and imagination.

The photographs in Alive and Destroyed set out to release—to uncapture—the volatile mixture of incomprehension, argument, reclamation, and loss that constitute the Holocaust as an inheritance for the living. Beyond being representations of sites in the world the Holocaust left behind, the images in Alive and Destroyed are themselves primary sites of meditation and mourning.