How We See The World

How We See The World. Barry Salzman

How We See The World will showcase the work of Barry Salzman, a contemporary photographer whose work explores subjects like community, heritage and identity. In 2014 Salzman began working on projects addressing collective historical trauma and memory, often related to places where genocide has taken place. This exhibition will feature two of these projects: a triptych of a Rwandan landscape and a photographic series entitled The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim, which consists of one hundred implicit ‘portraits’ of Rwandan war victims.

While photographing in Rwanda Barry Salzman recalled the words of philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman: “In order to know we must imagine for ourselves. Let us not invoke the unimaginable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying that we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine it to the very end. We are obliged to that oppressive imaginable.”

Triptych 
The triptych A Ravaged Land Healing I-III is part of the abstract landscape work in How We See The World, made at the precise locations where genocide has taken place. Using a long exposure time with intentional camera movement, Salzman dissolves hard reality into a picturesque mist, creating an opening for the viewer to comprehend the unimaginable that has happened there. 

Photographic series
To give context to his landscape work, Barry Salzman visited a site where a mass grave was being excavated in Rwanda. There, he made the photographic series The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim. The one hundred photographs show what the victims were wearing on the final day of their life. While photographing, Salzman became overwhelmed by emotion. He had the sense that he was not documenting objects, but portraying people. He therefore refers to the photographs as ‘portraits’. The final photograph in the series consists of a grey background and the words We Were, acknowledging the countless war victims who will never be individually identified.

“My hope is that each of these posthumous portraits forces us to imagine, and therefore commemorate, the lives of those who were killed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. We can never comprehend one million dead people. We can, however, imagine the life story of the little boy carrying his doggy backpack, and each of the other people represented in this series,” says Salzman.

Background information
The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi is estimated to have killed one million people. Many of the victims were killed individually by someone they knew. Citizen turning on citizen, neighbour turning on neighbour. People who had never killed before became murderers. The horrific and inhuman events that occurred in Rwanda 30 years ago and the many lives lost remind us of the importance and privilege of a life lived in peace.