Introduction
Luntz: I am very pleased to have all of you here. Our experience with Barry was a fortuitous one. Every year, we go to Paris Photo hoping to find something that we don’t know about that’s redeeming; somebody who’s doing something that inspires us. Two years ago, there was only one booth, and it was from the South African dealer that really inspired us and got us all thinking. What are these pictures about?
We were sort of stopped in our tracks. We didn’t really know how to read them, what to make of them, but we found them elusive, engaging and aesthetically beautiful. We found a photographer who was able to say things and make pictures unlike anybody else’s pictures. And that’s Berry.
So, he had museum shows and other obligations. It took two years to bring this together, but he has an interesting story with an interesting career switch. His path as a photographer has been a pretty fascinating one. What he’s doing is something nobody else is doing. And so, we thought it would be wonderful to have him here and to have him tell us about his journey and how these pictures came into being. He’s here to give us some insight into what he’s trying to say with them. So, Barry welcome.
It Never Rained on Rhodes
We’ll start with just a two-minute video that was his project at SVA, which is just a teaser, and this is what started his interest in his photographic work, and then we’ll go from there.
Luntz: I should have told you before this film started, Barry’s family came from Rhodes. A lot of Barry’s family did not survive Rhodes. When the Nazis were in Germany in the war, Rhodes turned over all of its Jews. A lot of them perished in concentration camps, and Barry decided to do a project based on his ancestors. It started as a personal search and his memories of them, and he said it wasn’t going to be about the Holocaust. It was just going to be their memories. But he said the people, his family members ,and his distant relatives all really wanted to talk about what happened. This was the beginning of Barry’s journey.
Salzman: Thank you. Thanks, Holden. Let me first just say how very, very grateful I am to Holden, Jodi, Gabe, and the whole team at the gallery. It was a dream beyond expectations to have a solo show at Paris Photo. There were artists in that show that have been icons of mine my entire adult life. To have Holden and Jodi invite me here out of everybody at Paris Photo is the most extraordinary, extraordinary honor. I want to thank all of you for showing up. I said to Holden and Jodi, “What if what if nobody comes?” So, I’m thrilled at this standing room only, so thank you very much.
The video you saw a short clip of was never intended to address the Holocaust. When I was at art school, I was very interested in the relationship between heritage and identity, and I wanted to examine my maternal heritage because it had been such a strong part of my identity. I agreed with everybody that I talked to that we weren’t going to discuss the Holocaust. Many of them had never ever spoken about it, not even to their own children. The minute the lights went off and the cameras went on in the studio, the first question I said was, “Tell me your name and where you’re from,” and everybody, without exception, talked about their time in the Holocaust.
When I went back to art school, I was ignoring it. I was doing a story about heritage and identity, and my advisor said to me, “Barry, you have to do what your footage is telling you.” And that’s how this came about. But you’ll notice, I edited out everything that said “Auschwitz, Nazi, Holocaust” because, for me, I wanted to make a universal piece on the idea of loss–loss of heritage, loss of identity, loss of place. This work screened at a festival in New York with a black artist who had done a film on African identity in Harlem and the loss of African identity. At the end of the festival, all of the black people in the audience came to thank me for this work telling their story, and that’s for me has sort of carried me forward with how I tried to abstract from the particularity of place in all my work.
So that video showed around the world, at festivals and everyone would put their hand up and say, “We know the story. We may not know that lady with the white shirt, but we know the story. I would always say, “If we know the story so well, how do we justify doing it again and again and again?” And that set me on the journey for the work we’re going to talk about.
Using the Landscape as a Metaphor
Luntz: So the work, when it began, began on a sort of grid structure. Do you want to explain how it started and how it evolved?
Salzman: Yeah, of course. So when I first started, I had come up with the idea based on a lot of research I had done at art school about using the landscape in a metaphoric way. There’s a Dutch painter, his name is Armando, and he came up with this concept of the Guilty Forest, which was also related to memories of World War II. And he said, “The trees of the forest are guilty because they see everything.” And he actually takes it even further to say, “The trees on the outskirts of the forest are more guilty than the other trees because they see more.”
So, I developed this idea. I wanted to use the landscape as this metaphor because in fact, like us, the landscape sees everything, like us, does nothing. And in fact, if you take the metaphor further, the trees shed their leaves and cover up. They become complicit, but they also rejuvenate. They restore, they replenish, they grow. And so, the metaphor for me is very beautiful because it takes responsibility for bearing witness, but also talks about the prospect of hope, hope for a better future.
Working in Grids: Poland and Ukraine
Salzman: So, I started working in Poland and Ukraine, and the work actually on the red wall is from Ukraine, which is particularly poignant because when I shot it, we had no idea that we were about to see another war in Ukraine. But I had no idea what I was doing. I just shot, and I wanted to work in as many different ways of interrogating the landscape as possible.
Salzman: So, I started working on these lateral movements with these shots. These are two of my early works, and it was shot on the last mile of train track into Sobibor concentration camp.
Because of the lateral movement, when you work from left to right, I think you give the eye permission to exit the photograph. You start, you move across, but by virtue of working in grids, I felt like I could keep the attention on what I was trying to do. And the idea of the underexposure, the overexposure, and the blurring was to extrapolate from that specific place and start to remind people that that place can become any place.
Salzman: So, I continued to work in grids for a little while. This is the Ukraine work, more abstract grid, but I was working left to right, and I was sort of concerned about the idea of retaining focus. And after the grid works, I started working like the work you’ll see in the room, much more vertically. When I moved the camera vertically, I felt like I was keeping the attention, my eye, in the center of the image instead of traveling through it.
The Start of Everything
Salzman: So I want to just talk about this one. I generally don’t expand specifically on what happened at a particular site because the work is really intended to be more interpretive and let people place it in their own experience, with the exception of this. So this picture, unfortunately, it’s sold out so we don’t have it on show here, but I did want to talk about it because it really sort of defined my path for the next 10 years. So, you saw the grid works, the idea of this lateral movement, and I’m going to extrapolate on what happened there because it explains the technique that I adopted for the whole project.
So I was in this forest, and I was working with historians in Poland who had all the GPS coordinates of all the unmarked mass graves, and they told me that in this forest about 40,000 people had been buried. The Jewish people were taken to the outskirts of their villages, they were lined up in front of pits, they were shot, the next person stood forward and got shot and met the same fate. And they were stripped naked, no one was armed, there was no defense. This man was standing behind his two children and saw his children get shot. I was told the story about how he had just gone crazy, like ran senselessly around the forest in this fit of frenzy and trauma.
I asked them to leave me in the on the site, and I tried to imagine what this man must have felt. I sat there and I bolted my camera to the tripod, and I started thrashing it around in this sort of delirious frenzy, left and right, and up and down, and I must have shot thousands of shots, and this was one that emerged. And you can see, the foreground and the leaves in the back are very, very sharp. The idea was to start working in the same technique to develop this visual language of the “The Veil,” the metaphoric veil that we construct between evidence and witness. I was talking to some students yesterday, and I said, “I think a lot about the child who watches a scary movie through the gap in their fingers. Even a child knows that the movie hasn’t changed, but by virtue of obscuring our view, we give ourselves permission to be less responsible, less accountable, less afraid.” This picture became the start of everything you see in the room.
Aesthetic with Motivation
Luntz: The interesting thing is, if you think about it and if you look at the pictures, and our response in Paris Photo to seeing a show of the pictures was they’re aesthetically very beautiful, they’re very mysterious, but the whole motivation behind them is that sense of trauma, that sense of loss, that sense of individual and collective memory. Can you talk about the sense that they’re motivated by places in the world where tragic things have happened, yet the pictures themselves are visually very beautiful to look at in very sort of very mysterious ways. It’s almost like Dylan that beauty walks a razor’s edge, and that sort of difference, that subtlety of beauty. Can you talk about what you think about the aesthetics when you’re putting a picture together and whether the aesthetics are a response to making something more palatable?
Salzman: The aesthetic is not an accident, right? I work hard to try and make an aesthetically pleasing shot, a shot that works for me, aesthetically. So, typically my process is incredibly research-driven. I know exactly where I’m going, what happened at each site, but I’m not so interested in documenting the specific site of the trauma because I think that’s been done. There are photojournalists that do that, there are documentarians that do that. And what I really wanted to do, which I’m not aware that anyone had done before, was comment on this idea of our role as public witness.
So to Holden’s question, I’ll start at a very specific site where something happened. But I’ll work very freely with the idea of witness distance and I’ll move outwards from that site until I find a moment that lets me make, what I think is, an aesthetic shot. So I’ll look for things like what the light is doing. Highlights, because highlights give me the ability to drag the light into the image. And I sort of feel like I’m asking the audience to deal with challenging material and I need to give the audience a way in. And the aesthetic is really the door opener. The invitation to go deeper if you choose.
But I feel like if I can’t engage an audience in an aesthetic level, then there’s no chance of a more substantive dialog. When I started working on this people said to me, “You can’t expect people to bring this kind of subject matter into their home.” And I said, “Look, that’s the problem. If it’s ok to have this conversation in an institution, university, school, museum, but not in the home, are we, in fact, becoming a part of the problem?” And the aesthetic was also a way for me to invite people to live with the work, and to continue to talk about it and tell the story. So it is a very intentional part of the practice.
Archival Glicée Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
Titles
Luntz: The titles are not specific. Just as the work is not specific. If you look at the slide up here, the triptych. This was an early one, this happened in 2018. So this happened earlier. Can you talk about how your practice as a photographer has evolved from an image like this to an image that’s layered in a different way.
Salzman: So generally my titles, but not this one, generally come from my extensive research on the subject. I’ll do a lot of research on the theory of landscape and the relationship between landscape and memory. I draw a lot of my titles from academic texts. And the titles are intended to give a clue that there’s something more that I want you to think about with the picture. But I don’t want to be didactic.
Metaphor and Abstraction
There’s a Dutch academic who was incredibly influential in my work and he basically said as a child he lived on the outskirts of a concentration camp. He learned about the Holocaust at school and he was completely unfazed by it. He was ambivalent at best. And as an academic and an adult, he started wondering why he been so indifferent. And his conclusion was the way the Holocaust was taught was too didactic. It was almost decided for you what you were supposed to think and feel. And he issues a call, a very specific call to artists. And he said, “It is the job of the artist to reengage the public consciousness with the right brain. The part of the brain that processes creative information and abstract information.”
I took that really to heart. So the idea was this sort of the idea of the metaphor, the idea of abstraction, the idea of giving space for interpretation. This was a and early work and I was very conscious of the responsibility of dealing with this subject matter. And so I was quite constrained in the beginning. I thought I had to work with a very narrow parameter. So this work is quite didactic.
It’s a triptych with part 1, part 2, part 3. And I’m sort of telling you to think about the phasing of these conflicts and the process of healing and recovery.
Salzman: This is a much more recent work. The two of them are on opposite walls and I love that they are in conversation with each other. But for me, this triptych is showing a much more liberal use of my creative process, and it’s almost showing the more confident I came with my voice on subject, the more permission I gave myself to explore the subject in a more abstract way.
When we installed the show, I wanted the two triptych pieces opposite one another because they really should bookend each other and in a way, my creative process.
How We See the World
Luntz: I had asked you about the titles and you explained that they are not specifically referential. You came up with the title of the exhibition which is, “How We See the World.” Where did that come from?
Salzman: So as I continue to research the topic there is a painting by Magritte titled “La Condition Humaine” which translates to “The Human Condition.” Most of you would recognize it I’m sure. It’s a picture of a room and a window and in front if the window is an easel and the painting on the easel is of a landscape. And when he spoke about that in a lecture he did in the late 30s, he coined the term that I took the title “How We See The World” from.
It really comments on this idea that, when we look at that painting of his, we assume that what’s on the other side of the easel is what we are seeing in his painting. And then you start to think about it and you realize how nonsensical that conclusion is, because we don’t know what’s on the other side of the easel. And for me that started me thinking about the difference between looking and seeing. What do we actually see when we look? And I like the interpretative nature of that, and so I used that as the title for this body of work.
The Ethics of Seeing
Luntz: When you look at the work, you can assume that they’re photoshopped, they’re heavily edited images. They’re not edited images. Especially, the piece on the screen. You’re seeing these kind of layers and this delicate floral pattern and these strong verticals. Can you talk about how you create the pictures? Because you said it’s very, very important that any editing that is done is done with your camera and it’s not a manipulated image afterwards. Can you talk about the practice of making the pictures?
Salzman: Yeah, so when I talk about the work, I often say that the work is about the ethics of seeing, our ethical responsibility of bearing witness. I felt like, as the artist wanting to comment on that, I had to have some sort of ethical boundary in terms of how I make the work. As many of you know with digital photography, you can make a picture say whatever you want. I felt like I had to put some parameters on how I made the work and it became very important for me that I had to make the work in a single exposure in camera. The lens being the metaphor for the eye. If the lens could see it in one shot, then for me it was legitimate commentary on what I wanted to say.
So what I started doing from that first picture where I told you the story about the man and his children, what I started doing from then was this I idea of longer exposures. Starting the exposure with my camera on a tripod and then moving the camera during the exposure. So when you take a walk around afterwards, you’ll see a lot of them. Like the one on the screen, have some elements that are very sharp, in precise focus, and then elements that are blurred from the intentional camera movement. But it also would stem from that particular story and the idea that I talked about of “The Vail.” By moving the camera, I feel like I’m creating this visual language for the vail between evidence and witness.
Open to Personal Interpretation
Salzman: I just want to talk about this one for a minute. The story I’m going to share with you, for me is really indicative of what I want people to think about when they look at the work. The idea is not to be too prescriptive what happened at each place, because I want the work to be open to personal interpretation. And the first time I exhibited “Divine Blooms” the woman who bought it came to thank me for a work that told her a story. And I said, “That’s interesting. Can you elaborate on that for me a little bit?” And she was a cancer survivor, and for her, the little yellow flowers, these defiant weeds, that survived against all odds was her story of survival and the picture had such personal resonance for her. And I feel like, when that happens, I’m doing what I intend to do. The work is really speaking to people.
The Camera as a Vehicle for Exploration
Luntz: It’s very important to understand that growing up in Cape Town, you said the white people lived in one place and black people lived in another place. Everybody was very much conditionalist as to you weren’t allowed. Either you lived in this neighborhood, this neighborhood or this neighborhood. And you said, since you were 14, you had been looking with your camera. Your camera gave you the freedom to go and see how other people lived or imagine how other people lived. So can you talk about that sense of the camera as a vehicle for exploration for you? For getting in touch with things that you want to think about and you want to share. And also, it’s not exactly connected, how important is the concept of color in your pallet.
Salzman: Sure, so I did start photography very early on. I got a camera as a birthday gift. I was growing up in apartheid South Africa and, at the time, there was extraordinary censorship in South Africa. We had no access to any media that was critical of the government. In fact, I didn’t even know what Nelson Mandela looked like until I came to live in New York because his image was banned. So we lived under extraordinary censorship and there was racial segregation as a part of apartheid and, I didn’t think about this until after the fact, but it was the camera that gave me a reason to explore. I got on my bicycle and a rode to an area that white people were not allowed to be in and I walked around with my camera. It was just this way to try and grapple with the inequities that were all around us. And I think without the camera, I wouldn’t have had the vehicle, the reason, to explore and I think that really experience carried with me when I came back to photography as a career.
Working in Color
My early work was in black and white. I trained in analog photography, I had a darkroom. But the work you see is all in color. I spent part of my training at art school when we were absolutely conditioned to ensure that the technique you used reinforced the concept of what you were trying to say. The work had to be supported by the technique you were using. I feel like if you’re going to deviate from whatever the standard technology of the day is, there has to be a substantive reason to do so. And the greatest technology of our day is color digital. So that’s what I work with because I think anything outside of that can start to feel trivialized, unless it’s ties to the content.
I did just do a work for Cape Town Art Fair where I used black and white and it was specifically to address the current conflict in Gaza. I realized, the more I thought about that, what was bothering me about that was the complete polarization of the public discourse on a global basis. It was not that people had different points of views. It was either it was all black or all white. The work that I made is pure black or pure white because I belt like the lack of color talked to the meaning. The title of the work is, “The Crudeness of Binary Painting,” and the idea of all black and all white sort of fed the binary notion or concept that I was trying to articulate. So I will deviate from color if there is a substantive reason to do so.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Luntz: So, Barry had a previous career, a Harvard MBA in business worked for Google, had a huge job in marketing, making a very good salary. He was told to stick around, he had stock options, etcetera. And he just said, “It’s not for me. I can’t do this anymore. It doesn’t feel real and it’s not what’s in my heart to do.” So you went to SVA (School of Visual Arts) in your mid-40s.
So, what is the experience like rededicating your life in your 40s? And saying, “This is my passion. This is what I need to do.” And what was it like making a new start? Was it scary? Was it hard at first to make the work? Or did it gel in your head that you knew exactly what you wanted to do and it went from there?
Salzman: No, I had no clue. I mean, I knew that I was incredibly disillusioned with corporate life, and I had really tried hard, but I just felt like I was constantly forcing a square peg into a round hole. And it just sort of felt more and more and more inauthentic.
I was about to turn 50, and I thought photography was really the only thing that I felt I had done in my life purely because it gave me joy. It was not about peer pressure or family pressure or earning an income. It was just what I did because I loved it. And I gave it up when I started my corporate career. So, for almost 30 years, I didn’t pick up a camera. And as I was about to turn 50, I thought, “If I want to have another shot at this, that window is going to close.”
So I applied to art school, knowing that, you know I’m super, super flattered to be here, but the odds of having a show like this at such a prestigious gallery were close to zero when I went to art school. And I didn’t mind. People said to me, “You’re crazy. It’s going to be super difficult. You’re going to destroy your passion.” But I just had to explore it. I knew that I was doing it purely for myself. I have to say, I think it’s probably the most authentic decision that I’ve ever made in my life.
Salzman: I was actually talking to someone a little earlier, telling a story. When I was working in Poland and Ukraine, which was sort of the first territory I covered. We were in Western Ukraine in a rural village in the middle of nowhere and we had the GPS coordinates of an unmarked Holocaust mass grave. And there were children playing soccer on the field. I lay on the ground, and I just watched them and I took pictures, which were purely for my own use, because I never want to put people in my landscapes because I feel like that implies a value judgment on people. That’s not my place to do. But I lay there, I watched these kids, and I took pictures. I really had this feeling like, if I died on the spot, I would be absolutely thrilled with the way my life had gone. So it was not daunting because I was just doing it for myself. If I had started out thinking, “How am I going to get into a gallery or get a museum show?” I think I probably would never have started.
Stumbling Blocks
Luntz: So talking about stumbling blocks along the way, when you talk about somebody’s history metaphorically and bearing witness and finding a poetic way to come up with images that are aesthetic, but get you thinking and open up an area and open up a time because really, landscapes are eternal. They are forever. Everybody is now used to getting images on their iPhone. They’re used to going to different sites and seeing images that are made fast, immediate, slick. Your images are slow. Time stops, history compresses itself, and then re-expands itself as you talk about thinking about what was, what is, and what may be. Do you ever get to a place of stumbling blocks where you don’t feel that you’re welcome to tell the stories? That you’re not welcome to be there?
Salzman: Great question. There were definitely moments in Ukraine where I felt that. But I think that was almost more sort of the fear that we were coming back to do research, to reclaim land, because I think there was definitely a consciousness that people were living on land that was not historically theirs or their families. So I did feel a little bit of that in Ukraine when we were working there.
But the biggest stumbling block is a personal one, you know? I think it’s not uncommon amongst creative people to have this sort of imposter syndrome. After almost every shoot, I look at the work and think, “I’m never going to be able to do that again.” And so that is the bigger sort of stumbling block. And because I don’t shoot every day, my practice is so research-driven, I could be two years of research before I go back into the field. It’s sort of those big blocks of time that present the bigger challenge to me than challenges from people in the environments that I go into.
Trial and Error
Luntz: Can you talk a little bit about the image above? Because the landscape is sort of repeated twice by moving the camera. Are you often sort of surprised? Do you have a sort of a sure moment that I’m looking at this picture in particular, because we were looking at it with somebody who really had admired it, and I noticed that the same landscape was shown twice. So, as the camera moved up, you have almost like a parallel existence, and metaphors are really important to your work to understand how a picture can say something metaphorically. So, you’ve said to me when we were talking about how much you shoot, you said, “I shoot an awful lot to get what I really want and what really works.” But in a picture like this, since you don’t know what it’s going to look like because you’re moving the camera, are you often surprised by what you see?
Salzman: Yeah, I think that the honest answer would be yes. But I kind of have a rough idea of what my settings need to be, all going back to that first photograph that I told you about that sort of set me on this journey. I know what my settings were for that. So, I’ll typically start with that, and I know if I have the makings of a good photograph because I need highlight, I need sky, I need something to drag the light through.
I don’t shoot sort of like a photojournalist-style photography. So, if I was going in just to document that poppy field, I would get my exposure right, I would get my focus right, I would take the picture, and I would move on. But this idea of working with this slow shutter speed and moving the camera is an incredibly meditative process. So, I might spend a couple of hours at a time and then go back. This poppy field I went to several times, and it only was blooming for a couple of days. So, I would go in the mornings and evenings, sunrise and sunset.
But I don’t know what result I’m going to get. I know that I’m working with this intentional camera movement, and I’ll shoot and shoot and shoot until I feel like I’ve got something. But it’s really not until I get back into the studio and I can look at the work on a bigger screen that I really know whether it works. I wish I could tell you that I could go back and replicate that shot. The honest answer is that I couldn’t. I might get something that is similar, the idea would be there, but I could never replicate the identical shot because it really is an awful lot of trial and error.
Veils and the Layered Landscape
Luntz: You have consistent veils in your pictures. You’re looking from one surface through another surface, with one treatment of light to another treatment of light. Can you talk about that sense of how looking through veils, looking through image upon image or images that shift is basic to how you work?
Salzman: Yes, I think it is right at the core of what I try to do. The concept of veils is significant in the theory of photography and a lot of the critical theory that’s been written deals a lot with this idea of veils. And a lot of the theory of landscape talks about the notion of the layered landscape. So what I’m doing in these works is sort of combining two academic principles around the concept of veils and what they mean to photography and the notion of the layer landscape. So I think a lot about those two concepts and try to combine them in most of the works.
Different Views of a Similar Scene
Luntz: There’s a big range between this, which is very literal and you can see through it, and this where the image is almost obliterated through almost light flare. A picture like this, when you’re thinking about it, the sense of letting in all that light and almost softening the image is an intentional choice. Compared to this, which is really similar, right? But it’s a very different range, and that’s sort of darker and you can see into it much more.
Salzman: Yes, I try to work a lot with the idea of contrast or different views of a similar scene. So the two on either side of the door, this is called “The Silent Valley” and that’s called “The Silent Valley Filled with Sound.” And a lot of these works are pairings, but I don’t necessarily combine them as diptychs or triptychs, but I want them to be in dialogue with one another and particularly when I can sort of tap into the dark and the light, the hope and the fear, they are the Ying and the Yang. I try to do that a lot and I think with these works, taken at different times of day and different exposures, where I’m trying to articulate the same idea but in a different way.
A New Direction
Luntz: The show that we have now is incredibly beautiful. It’s 10 years worth of work.
The new work really is pictures that are torn and put together again. There’s a sense of putting things together, unifying, and healing. So I think it’s easy to look at the range of work and say that there is sort of darkness in the work. There may be sadness in the work. There may be that collective memory of trying not to look back, trying not to remember what could have occurred. But, I think you want, and in the new work and where you’re going, I think you want to take a whole different path and to say that the landscape always blooms again, it always renews itself, and there’s always a sense of healing. So can you talk about your newest works?
Salzman: And then, last year, actually, it started during COVID when I was sort of homebound, and I started relooking at my archive of pictures I’d made from Poland, Ukraine, very early on, but more sort of classic landscape works, which didn’t really have a place in this story about the veils and the filters, where I hadn’t shot with intentional camera movement. But they were beautiful landscapes. When I was looking at these more conventional, beautiful landscapes, I started thinking a lot about the process of post-trauma healing and recovery because we do, in fact, heal. Life goes on. We go through these awful personal traumas, global historic traumas, but we do put the pieces together again, and life goes on. And so, with these pieces, what I was interested in doing was cutting up the landscape and then recompositing it as a way of trying to fix it, to heal, to move on. So, we do put the pieces together again, but they never fit in quite the same way. But we know exactly what we’re looking at. It just doesn’t look exactly the same way as it looked before. These works I just exhibited for the first time last weekend, actually, in Cape Town, and they were incredibly, incredibly well-received. We do heal, we do move on.
The Burden of Time and Memory
Salzman: I want to just talk about this one for a moment because the story is really beautiful. So, that was a tree in Namibia, and it’s one of the very rare moments where I actually shot an image at the specific site where something traumatic occurred.
So, during the Namibian genocide, between 1904 to 1908, the literature says thousands, but certainly many hundreds of Herero people were hanged by the German occupiers of Southwest Africa off that tree. When we were there, it was 2022. I shot the source imagery over 110 years after the genocide that occurred. And there’s this very rickety little fence that the local community had erected around the tree to protect it, to stop people playing on it or climbing on it. And it became this place of religious remembrance, this holy place for the Herero community where they would go back to commemorate and remember their ancestors who had perished from the genocide. When I took this picture I was not quite sure what I was going to do with it. I shot multiple angles of this tree in this beautiful sunrise light. And two months after I shot the picture, the person who had taken me there sent me a picture showing that the tree had fallen down. And so it almost became this symbol of my practice, which is really, the tree under the burden of time and memory just couldn’t take it anymore.
What’s Next?
Luntz: So, one last question from me and then I’ll open it up to questions from you. I think people want to know, you know you’ve taken an incredible journey, you’ve gone from continent to continent, you’ve researched all of these historic places. What comes next?
Salzman: A secret…. So, when I first scoped this project out, I really didn’t realize that when I would be talking about the work, we would be dealing with, you know, is there another genocide going on or not? I mean, it was the furthest thing from my mind. But when I scoped it out, there were six genocides across the 20th century that I picked, each one for a different reason. There are works here that represent four of them. I’ve worked in Namibia, Poland, and Ukraine, Rwanda, and Bosnia. So, four of the six. I do want to work on the Cambodian genocide, which I’m hoping to do either at the end of this year or very early next year, just depending on pre-production and people’s schedules. And then the sixth one is a little more complicated but very important, which is Armenia.
A lot of people associate the term genocide with the Holocaust, but Raphael Lemkin, who came up with the term, actually developed the term, conceived of the term to address what was going on with the Armenian genocide. So, I really wanted to do that, but the only place you can really access those sites is in Eastern Turkey. And I think President Biden’s got enough on his hands right now; he’s not going to come and get Barry Salzman out of Eastern Turkey. But I would like to get there. And when I’ve covered those six, I’d like to do a book looking at the whole scope.
And then I’ve be thinking a lot about a new body of work that relates to poetry written by others, because I really love the idea of visually interpreting somebody else’s language, somebody else’s words. There are a couple of poets who’ve dealt with the idea of trauma and healing and recovery through historical war. There’s a Polish Nobel Laureate poet who wrote a poem called, the English translation is “Reality Demands,” and the gist of it is reality demands that life goes on. And she looks at all these places of historical conflicts and war but ties it to what’s happening, to the life goes on, the banality of day-to-day existence. So, she talks about Hiroshima, what had happened there, but today the factories are blowing out smoke as they provide products for the rest of the world. Or she’ll talk about Guernica and the history of Guernica, but then she’ll say, and today, the little boy is chasing his dog down the street. And I really want to stay thematically with the material I’m interested in, but to really start looking more at the “life goes on” part of it. And I think that would just give me a lot more flexibility in terms of what I shoot, how I shoot, stylistic, starting to work in different sizes. So, that’s probably what’s next.
Questions?
Luntz: Great. Does anybody have questions? We’ll take some questions.
Audience member: So every project starts with such, not just sad, but how evil people can be to one another. How do you not let this consume you? Because, I mean, at the end of the day, the images are beautiful and healing, but it must be so hard when you start this, and you start, even for me, just thinking about what we talked about yesterday and today, it really weighs on me. So, how do you move forward from one to the other, and not just kind of let it get you down?
Luntz: That’s a great question. For those that didn’t hear it, you look at these pictures and there is sadness, and there is inhumanity to mankind, and there are negative connotations that sort of bring out the worst in people, rather than the best of people. I think Scott’s question is, “How can you spend 10 years dealing with that and not letting that get you down?”
Salzman: You know, I don’t think of them as sad at all. For me, the process is really, you know, I work through the lens of time and memory. I think it would be very different if I went into a current war zone, but that’s really not what my practice is about. To me, I find that much more about the process of contemplation and healing. These are historical events that we’re all familiar with. So, I find it actually quite therapeutic and calming when I’m in these locations. There are moments like, what I told you yesterday about being on the site of a discovery of mass grave in Rwanda, there are moments that are incredibly challenging when the human aspect is more dominant. But generally speaking, when I work on the landscapes, I’m thinking much more about the healing powers of time and memory.
Luntz: I forgot to do something really important. I was good about welcoming you and we are thrilled to have you here, but I get to greet all of you, which is my pleasure. I get to think of some questions, which is nice because I can sort of articulate what I want to know. But what I didn’t say is there’s a team of eight of us here. I have the easy part. Everybody that’s part of this gallery participated in this show, whether it’s selecting work, whether it’s coordinating framing, whether it’s coordinating website content, whether it’s actually installing the show. So, everyone from this team, all eight of us, are enthusiastic about what we’re doing, are totally on board with this. But they all did the hard work, and I did the easy work. So, this was a team effort and we are so proud and so delighted to have the show.
Salzman: Speaking of an amazing team, Jaye wants to say something.
Jaye: I was fortunate enough to go with Barry yesterday. Barry spoke to 150 students at Dreyfoos School of the Arts, High School students. I’m an alumni of Dreyfoos. The dean of my department, Peter Stodolak, is here. It is the most amazing community and Barry gave the most incredible talk. It was life-changing for me, and I’m not a student. I watched these students process, we’re fortunate enough to have some of the students here in person today and watching on our live Instagram.
I recorded that conversation and got permission from their principal. I’m going to share that on the website. Every time Barry opens his mouth, I think he’s saying new things, but I’m also finding myself… I think you have, as a defense mechanism, you kind of start to close your mind to certain things because they’re very challenging and they’re painful. And you find yourself saying, “I can’t even imagine.” But Barry does imagine, and Barry kind of helps make things digestible and bring things to light. So, I’m going to share that video.
We also did an interview with Barry that’s on our website, and I really encourage you to read it. You can watch this live again. You can watch the conversation he had with the Dreyfoos students, because every time you hear him speak, you’re more receptive, and there’s so much more that starts to come through.
Come back and revisit the show and spend time looking at the works and really digesting them, because they’re not just beautiful images that you look at, and they kind of… they look like they would be these calming, serene moments, but they’re so poignant. And he’s saying so much and really challenging you. I feel like at this point, we’re all fatigued, and we’re not accepting the challenges the same way that we were open to originally and maybe even earlier this year, but his work is so incredibly important, and I just encourage you to take the time, watch that presentation, read about Barry, come back and visit the work, let yourself digest. Because my cogs haven’t stopped turning since I started talking to Barry, and I just keep finding the most amazing nuggets of information. And he’s changing the way that I’m seeing things, and I just encourage you all to continue to be open and digest it.
Luntz: Thank you, Jaye. I also wanted to tell people that if they want to know more about Barry, on his website there is a Keynote Speech that was delivered to…
Salzman: It was in commemoration of the 28th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. I was invited to speak to the Rwandan community. It was extraordinarily emotional to be speaking to a room of survivors of the Rwandan genocide.
Luntz: It’s an amazing speech to listen to. It’s powerful. If you want to know more, or hear more, it’s really worth listening to.