Silent Places Resound

August 6, 2008 on 12:20 pm | In General |

Silent Places, resounds hauntingly, and takes us on a poignant, and incredible photographic journey to Eastern Europe, where he documented (in B&W photographs) the architecture and landscape of the Holocaust era…Synagogues, houses, landscapes, windows, doors, parks, all images from the past, but actually taken recently. The B&W aspect gives a ghost-like and haunting composition to the photographs…the aura of life within the frame illuminating our senses.
Gusky, an M.D., was an amateur photographer, when he began his sojourn into Eastern Europe. What he brought back, was a visual so intense, that he now has become well-respected in both the art/photographic world and the world of books. His work is museum quality.

Time erodes the landscape, and even the architecture, but the sense of humanity and life still exist within the confines. We feel the aura of the past, brought into the present, the sounds of silence and former life, and activity resounding, for all of us to view. The ghosts of the past, sing their song, through broken windows, deteriorating doors, ruined homes, leaving an indelible mark in the time continuum, compelling us to wonder WHY?

Gusky’s Silent Places is a work that we soon not forget, and a book both compelling and haunting. It is a historical journey into the depths of loss, destruction and places that once hummed with Jewish life.

The history defined within the illuminations of this book define us all on some scale. We all have history, all have ancestral pasts, villages and cities of life, that run through our genetics, our veins. Time erodes much of our past, our life’s history…and in that aspect…this book gives us to ponder and realize, that each person’s history is a part of the universal whole, and leaving the silence deafening. We must never forget the past, the horrors of the Holocaust/Shoah, the lives lost through genocide, lives uprooted, lives of those ashes that continue to hauntingly resound in their silence.

I personally own, and have read this book.