On European Ground

This collection of photographs offer a visual meditation on the traumas that scar 20th-century Europe. Alan Cohen's photographs capture the essence of the battlefields of World War I, the Nazi death camps and the Berlin Wall, and records the distance between what we remember about these places and what we can still observe in them today. Pictures of the trenches at the Somme and Verdun explore the tension between the violence of the past and the inscrutability of its remnants. Photographs from Dachau and Austwitz solicit dialogue between the bareness of the sites now and the memories and images they evoke. Images of the Berlin Wall show only the footprints of the barricade that once separated two hostile ideologies. They record the physical erosion of the Wall while capturing its reappearance as a memorialized abstraction. Essays and an interview with Cohen accompany the photographs. The essays provide an aesthetic analysis of Cohen's work, while the interview discusses the problem of history and memory.