Weimar

For this body of work, I return again and again to the small German town of Weimar, attracted by the countless layers of history that overlap there. Weimar is famous as a place of poets, artists and philosophers, as the place where the Bauhaus was founded and where Germany first attempted democracy. Yet Weimar’s history also includes Buchenwald, the former concentration camp built on the nearby Ettersberg, where Goethe once wandered and wrote.

I have spent countless hours walking and photographing in and between Weimar and Buchenwald in an effort to understand their ties to the past, the present, and also the future. I have observed the town’s youth and its many young visitors, taken there on school trips from around the country, during their explorations and attempts to make sense of the history presented to them. I have looked at the same places over and over again, observing the shifting light and reflecting on the instability of memory and each new generation’s burden to decide what of our representations of the past they will preserve, resist, or reinvent.