The Forest: Journeys and Cross-Sections
Ariel Yannay's series of photographs, Black and White Forest, reopens the delicate issue of representing the Holocaust. While some scholars insist that the Holocaust cannot be represented, since it pertains to the Real, something which is beyond any sense or image, others hold that there are images which can nevertheless draw one closer to the Holocaust, images which touch upon that Real to some extent.
As far as visual imagery and the visual field are concerned, the question also pertains to the form these images take. Do they represent the reality of things, or only one of many interpretations of a given occurrence? Is the featured image the thing itself or one of multiple readings? This question itself attests to the status of the image as a mediator, a medium, as a window between the picture of reality constructed from a given point of view and its essence. For this very reason psychoanalysis has emphasized the status of the image as a veil. In art, this issue has been addressed in diverse manners, some of them radical which ostensibly strive to expose the reality of the atrocity—the realness of the Holocaust, in this context—the living flesh, and eliminate all sublimation. Such a stance does not distinguish between the representation of a dead person, for instance, and the representation of Death, which are two very different things. Often, such a modus operandi—which endeavors to represent Death itself by embracing among its images materials used for the extermination, thereby infusing the paintings or photographs with an air of death—is paradoxically congruent with the basic assumption of Holocaust deniers regarding the absence of proof of the verity of the Final Solution. The latter negate facts arising from oral testimony or even photographs, deeming them inaccurate historical proof. Such a mode of representation is a perverse, shallow exploitation of the Holocaust, which transforms a concrete chemical substance into a decisive proof, thereby excluding the substantiality of its complexity, which no single meaning or image can encompass.
The other pole, which rejects image representation altogether, entirely annuls the power of the imagination to relate to the inexplicable. Often, however, Holocaust-related images strike profound chords within us; they even interpret us better than any other horror photograph. The inundation of horror images of all kinds these days may be likened to an invitation for pure voyeurism, which strips the documentation or the work of art of all symbolism. The uniqueness of the Black and White Forest photographs lies in the invitation for introspection and contemplation of one's attitude toward the world and society vis-à-vis the Holocaust.
Yannay's aesthetic photographs take the viewer on a journey; a journey that sketches, or rather paints, with strokes of light and shade, in black and white, the portrait of the forest enveloping that which was erased. We are faced with a noble quest during which the beauty of the setting and the ostensible tranquility prevailing therein confront us with something which pricks our eyes, shifting us to another scene, which expels us from the reign of the Pleasure Principle. In some respects, it is a journey from dream to nightmare, from the beauty of the image to the horror underlying it.
The exhibition and its installation surrender three cross-sections. The first is a horizontal cross-section represented by the panoramic view which generates a panopticon image, an "all-seeing" picture. It is a picture placed horizontally on a table-window, locating the viewer in an overseeing position. Jeremy Bentham's notion of the panopticon served as a basis for the plan of a prison. It relied on the centrality of the surveillance point in the structure, from which all events may be viewed, emphasizing the status of the viewed subjects as constantly exposed to this gaze without knowing from where they are being viewed. In such a configuration omnipresence is epitomized. It is the presence of the gaze.
The panorama in the exhibition generates the panopticon space, and its different segments make up the fan array produced by the trajectory of the eye. While one may ostensibly discuss the trajectory of the viewer's eye pivoting along the picture's horizon, the multiplicity of angles, the multiplicity of sections in the picture, encompasses a space, thereby generating the central void which closes in on us. The viewers thus become those viewed by the gaze of the forest. The resulting void is that which was lost, that which was eradicated, which operates here as a cause, as that which underlies the panoramic image.
The multiplicity of angles not only constructs the perspective of the place in a swift flight along the horizon; through the segments' nonuniformity (in terms of the differences in their printing), the panoramic image also presents the diversity of vantage points, further reinforcing the question: who or what is, in fact, viewing and who or what is being viewed, since the panopticon and the multiplicity of vantage points generate fluctuations between the place of the observer and the place of the observed.
The second cross-section is vertical, represented by the photographs on the walls. It is a cross-section of the forest itself, like a dance of drawing near and away from it. Several photographs present a broader picture of the forest trees, with the empty space in the foreground. Others lead us on a tour amid the trees, guiding us to being in the woods. Yet another group of photographs underscores the detail: the individual tree, a close-up of a trunk. Movement is thus generated from the whole to the detail, and concurrently—from the forest there to the forest here, in Israel, and from the past to the present.
Another movement embedded in this cross-section is the transition from the white forest series through the series of grayscale images to the black forest series. These transitions enhance the light effects, from spots of white to opaque blackened areas. In both instances, details which are only manifested in the grayscale series, disappear. The disappearance of the details in the white flecks renders them stains of light, eliciting a sense of dazzle, while the opacity created by the emphasis of the black conveys the opposite feeling. The dance of approaching and withdrawing, the transitions between white and black, accentuate the status of the image as a veil, making it possible to distinguish between the whiteness of dream, the whiteness of the fantastical landscape, and that which lurks behind it: the blackness of horror, the nightmare of atrocity. These series illustrate the idea that beauty operates like a mask, like a veil, or even a barrier before the Kakòn (κακὸν), the object of evil. The forest and its magnificent beauty conceal the darkness of death.
The photographs' delicacy only reinforces the aforesaid cross-sections, the movement between transitions, capturing the eye until the viewer is imprisoned like a subject, like one torn between dream and nightmare. The exhibition sketches not only a portrait of Treblinka, but mainly the portrait of the spectator, the struggle that may occur in him during the journey to the forest. This leads us to the third cross-section, which binds all three together, represented in the exhibition by Chavka Folman-Raban's video testimonial. She too went to Treblinka during the war, to the village and its surroundings, to confirm rumors about the mass murder of Jews in the area. Today the place marks, for her, the grave of her father, the first member of the family to disappear from the ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto, who was probably murdered in the camp. The interview commences and concludes with the same notion: the inability to believe, to grasp, to accept what happened, and "when you are reluctant to believe, you reject the truth." The personal journey to Treblinka is like the Holocaust as a whole: you hear about the ghetto, Aktion, deportation; about travel, underground, masquerading; about trains and more trains; you hear about mass murder, and about the fear. Voice and speech join the gaze, and we are faced with a subjective stance which invokes the question, whether or not to believe.
Belief and disbelief always go hand in hand. This pair is the thread running through the various cross-sections, since it presents the psychic quest vis-à-vis the forest… The mind often refuses to accept what the eye sees and the perspective constructed by the angle of vision, just as the rumors demand that the eye see in order to verify them. In both cases the search for the truth is accentuated, but there is also another dimension which does not pertain to explanation, proof or sense that the truth may acquire, but rather to a presence which eludes wording, which evades proof; something present in the nightmare, in the delusion, in the smell that strikes one and conjures up another scene, in the single word that cuts through the flesh, that slaps like a whip, the command: Wstawać (get up) which Primo Levi heard like silent thunder in his ears. It is the confrontation of solidity, like a bone in one's throat, which returns the speaking creature to the same place time and again.
The exhibition's subtitle refers to two journeys. Which are they? Are these Folman-Raban's journey and the photographer's journey? Yannay's two journeys, one as a visitor and one as a photographer? Or, perhaps, the two journeys in the footsteps of the fathers—that of an underground courier who regards Treblinka as her father's grave, and that of the photographer following his own father's journey to the family grave? Perhaps the journeys are those of the exhibition and its viewers. This totality of options from the past and from the present is condensed by the forest photographs.
Walter Benjamin writes: "… image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural (bildlich). Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded."1
In other words, the dialectical image calls forth a multiplicity of images, a fragmentary sequence, a constellation which is, on the one hand, the possible way for the emergence of knowledge in a flash, to use Benjamin's terminology, indicating knowledge as such: the flash is not linked to the temporal sequence of images, but rather to the fact that their interrelations touch upon something erupting from within them in a flash. On the other hand, the constellation also exposes that which lurks behind the flash: that knowledge is, in fact, an act of reading, the reading of images.
You are thus invited to read Ariel Yannay's forest photographs.
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, "N [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]," in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 463.