Sites Unseen

by Shimon Attie

Sites Unseen is a collection of six moving photography and public art projects from different European cities merging images of the Holocaust with present-day scenes and places by well-known... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966035216
• ISBN13: 9780966035216
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Verve Editions
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Attie's earlier work on Berlin foreshadows this book.

March 27, 2001 This is a review I wrote of Attie's Berlin photo project for New York Jewish Week in 1996. I thought his work was so wonderful when I saw it in a Manhattan gallery. I can't say it any better now than I did then. The new book contains examples from a few additional projects, which also are very moving. My review contains interview with the photographer. -- Toby AxelrodTime Exposures Resurrecting Berlin's Jews, in photographs.BY TOBY AXELROD Staff WriterIf Berliners in the 1930s and '40s could have seen the future of the Jews projected on their streets, would they have stopped to look, to listen? Would more of them have resisted? The question is not a futile one in response to the remarkable work of photographer Shimon Attie, who projects images of Berlin's Jewish past onto the present void. One would have to be as unfeeling as Berlin's old stone walls not to see his images as warnings -- or, as the 37-year-old Californian puts it, "opportunities for reflection."The project -- "Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter" -- was born of Attie's own reflections. Attie, whose mother's family comes from Germany and father's from Syria, moved to Berlin in 1991. "It had to do with tracing my own roots somehow."He found himself "walking the streets, looking everywhere and urgently asking myself, `Where are the missing people? What happened to them? Where did they go?' ''Knowing the fate of European Jewry was not enough. In Germany, Attie "felt this presence but I couldn't see it. There was a discrepancy between what I felt and what I did not see."That presence inspired him to create "Writing on the Wall," which appeared last fall at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum; the title itself is a pointing finger. For a year, starting in September 1991, he projected slides of photographs of Jews in the 1920s and '30s onto buildings in East Berlin's Jewish quarter -- the "Scheunenviertel," or barn district -- matching as many as possible to their original sites (about 25 percent). He then photographed these projections, at night, exposing the film for three or four minutes, achieving an eerie glow.The results are jarring: An elderly, bearded Jew of the 1930s looks out of a doorway in the '90s, as if startled by the photographer. A man in a hat stands looking into a Jewish bookstore, the black-and-white image rippling over a pocked stone facade. Jews long since turned to ashes stand again, their backs against a wall during a Gestapo roundup. A green beer bottle perches on the black-and-white windowsill of a Jewish-owned bird shop, its cages lining the sidewalk, standing out from the flat, dark surroundings. Projected onto a corner, Jewish newspapers on a stand announce the events of a day in 1935.Witnesses of those days might pass have passed silently before such scenes and moved on. But today, one can look long and hard at frozen images of everyday life or of suffering that might have caused one to hurry past not so many

Moving...emotionally evocative...first-rate artistry

Shimon Attie uses ethereal-seeming projections of photo slides onto surfaces of water and buildings to give us a ghostly view of faces and facades now vanquished by history's most demonic event: the Holocaust. Althouh depicting the dead, the photographs in the book evoke immortality and force us once again to ask the question to which there is no answer. The effect these images have on me is at once shattering, the sense of loss being overwhelming, and reaffirming because they also pay such beautiful yet unsentimental homage to what is noble and good in us. In both design and execution, the book is truly formidable.