glass_jenna

Never, Again, Again.

I was fortunate enough to spend the spring semester of my junior year studying abroad. Because I was also a an Poli Sci "international relations" focu...
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I was fortunate enough to spend the spring semester of my junior year studying abroad. Because I was also a an Poli Sci "international relations" focus major, I took my capstone Thesis class while there. I attended a Uni in London, but the nature of topic I elected to focus hone in on for my paper, a comparative analysis of government sanctioned capital punishment internationally, afforded not only a chance to travel more, but to travel to iconic places - historical graveyards. The fact that I had truly brilliant and also epically cool thesis advisor over there also helped; he got me into places (legally) that the he general public, and even a few times many academics, don't get to go see. This photograph is a new and massively revised composition of a a shot I snapped on 15 April, 2009. At the time I took as a "source image", for me to referer back to later - a way to be sure when writing the actual paper, I was describing the detail of the things I'd seen accurately. It was taken (with permission of course) during my first tour of Auschtwiz-Birkeanu II. That tour was the same one any one who wants to see the place gets. Probably not a total shock as I imagine most, if not everyone reading these words has seen a photo of the place exact place my photo pictures before - the Nazi prisoners' nickname for it is infamous -- The Gate of Death. I have to say, after having visited it in person, the gravity of this place, is more acutely conveyed in the poetic imagery of Elie Wiesel, wrote of it as "the antechamber to Hell".

The prints back in '09 were 1hour-photo (literally and metaphorically) They were hollow images, I knew it always but back then, I viewed them as aresearch tool, not art, and hollow images more than suffices for research. Regardless, the knowledge a photo of a thing so deep lacked any depth at all, has been rattling around, a nagging whispery-like-echo in the back part of Photographer-Jenna's brain. Then recently, I found myself with the whatever a photographer might call writers block. Suck in a creative silence; at a loss to generate any ideas for a new or different subject to photograph. And the nagging whispery echoed gradually louder the longer since my head went empty. When it reached the same decibel of a harpy screaming, I decided I would make new prints of the old shots as my project instead of taking new shots. So I braved the crawl space where I stupidly stored the mess that is my academic archive. Which I dug through until I unearthed (at least some of) the original 2009 - negatives. To make the new prints I'm (at least for now) using both a traditional darkroom tools as well as digital editing software - to reframe the subject of the shot in this sort of concentric recompositional circle of itself. Somehow that renders the image of a landscape into that of a portrait photo. Or at least, at the very least, into a thing that even tries to to echo to something bigger than itself as an image of place and land -

I want to to speak the things you hear when you are literally there, a reminder and warning that,
Hallowed spaces are living places. Live beyond anything you thought ever even possible, so much more alive, you instantaneously, and instinctively, know than you, yourself, are, or can ever hope to be, during any and every moment you spend breathing in such a space.

I'm not there yet. I don't know if I ever can be, but whenever I wind up with a print that gets closer, will replace what you're seeing now with the newer version. Until I can't anymore.
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