Berlin: The Living and the Dead

ISBN-13: 9781944521042 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 42 str.

Peter Shaindlin

Opis

Photographed in Berlin between 2014 and 2016. The aesthetic rhythm of this haunting visual ontology of Berlin binds the historical and the metaphysical. Can the stillness of a photograph rectify the astonishing contradictions within a city unparalleled in terms of intellectual and artistic pedigree with its blood soaked past?

Across the span of bifurcated day and night imagery, photographer Peter Shaindlin pits the human element in its purest form against the bitter backdrop of chill German winter, creating a collective mood at once of doubt and hope that exposes the past as it questions the future.

BERLIN

I.
Even if you were torn down, leveled to the Eural plains that lay as fields that met the night where birds were tucked by God within- The ragged reeds and marsh and dew

Even if you met with God and begged him to allow us to return together to a time before the trains and camps and gas and he said "yes"-

Even if we woke to hear Eroica descend as light a shadow would still mute this place because, for reasons never clear it simply cannot breathe

II.

Gutter slog-bitchy city Rank, stinking Nazi ghosts -death cloud

Cement you poured on bodies

You shot a dog right through the head and forgot about a time in the countryside in summer before the war of wars A place with a great house and barn, and Horst -that might have been his name

He was there and lived it-dirt and silt and bitter greens Rubbed Kirshwasser in his daughter's eyes to cure scarlet fever before you lined up the trains and shoveled them into hell

III.

Dead place, Berlin

I move to the shadows Thursday I go away from here but part of me is severed now and left with you

You have my hand

You will be what you were until the twenty third chapter when Paul descends and the masses move toward the river

IV.Epilogue

The sky that morning was so blue, the air so clear that one could see the mountains fifty miles afar Everything was gently bathed in rays of springtime sun

The girl stepped up onto the bus Only her eyes were visible when the driver watched her pay the fare

After the roar and the silence they sat together in eternity not knowing if they had been people or dogs

-- from Ravens, Nights by Peter Shaindlin