To visit the Nazi execution sites of Eastern Europe today is to face one’s deepest senses of fear and intrigue. Walking the lonely, isolated forest paths is the one thing I can do to attempt to understand.
For hundreds of thousands of lost souls, their memory lies In Fields. This is for them.
Sometime in the mid naughties I read a book that changed so much in my life. Into That Darkness by Gita Sereny is the biography of Frank Stangl, one-time commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, located some 80km north east of Warsaw.
The devastating reality Sereny describes struck me to the core and fuelled an interest in the holocaust that persists to this very day. To visit the execution sites today is to face one’s deepest senses of fear and intrigue. Walking the lonely, isolated forest paths is the one thing I can do to attempt to understand.
In Fields is my attempt to make sense and communicate these experiences. I believe it remains my most accomplished piece of work to date.
For the hundreds of thousands of lost souls, their memory lies In Fields.
The infra-red images and solitary sound track of In_Fields speak of a reaction to the unimaginable. It is my personal response to visits to the killing sites of Eastern Poland and Lithuania.
Tip: Best appreciated with headphones and full screen.
"I have always said that archival images are images without imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation."
Update: 08.09.2023
My "commitment to understanding" remains unabated after all these years.
In respect of this, a massive thank you to Weronika Kwiatkowska & Łukasz Kukawski at The Sobibor Museum for their intelligence, dignity and integrity in supporting the future by enhancing our knowledge of the past.
