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.

Alan Cohen is an adjunct associate professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a visiting professor at DePaul University. His work is held in more than fifty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the liberal arts and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the director of the Humanities Laboratory. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of more than sixty books. His most recent monograph, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, appeared in 1999. Jonathan Bordo teaches aesthetic theory and philosophy in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University, Canada. His recent essays include Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness in Critical Inquiry (winter 2000). Bordo is completing a monograph titled The Landscape without a Witness and a collection of writing in aesthetic theory and the visual arts. Roberta Smith is an art critic for The New York Times.