A Wounded Landscape
Bearing witness to the Holocaust
by Marc Wilson
A Wounded Landscape: bearing witness to the Holocaust by Marc Wilson, functions as a visual reminder of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators across a vast and varied landscape, where persecution often began in the places the victims called home.
Instigated by his own family history experienced during the Holocaust, Marc Wilson embarked on a profound six-year odyssey from 2015 to 2021, documenting 130 locations across 20 countries. He has captured the physical remnants of the Holocaust and intertwined them with the deeply personal stories of 22 survivors and their descendants. A Wounded Landscape is a powerful testament to the indomitable resilience of the human spirit and serves as a compelling call to never forget the horrors of the past.
Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis systematically murdered almost six million Jews and countless others they deemed racially inferior or targeted for ideological and political reasons, from nearly 40,000 sites across Europe. This included Roma, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and over three million Soviet prisoners of war.
The scars left by the Nazis’ campaign of persecution and destruction are deeply etched into the European landscape. While some images in the exhibition show Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz, which are recognised worldwide, Wilson has also captured numerous other sites of atrocity within cities, towns, villages, fields, and forests whose terrible history has faded from public consciousness. They are places where life-or-death decisions were made, but they also hold stories of hope, survival, and memory.
A SIDE Gallery touring exhibition.
Image: Area to the right of the crematoria in the forest camp at Kulmhof extermination camp, Rzuchowski forest, Poland, 2015. © Marc Wilson
Artists
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Marc Wilson
(B. 1968, London) Marc Wilson’s studies took him from Sociology to Photography, and he has been taking photographs ever since. His images document the memories, histories and stories set in the landscapes surrounding us. Wilson works on long-term documentary projects. They include The Last Stand, 2010-2014, and A Wounded Landscape - bearing witness to the Holocaust, 2015-2021. He has published 4 photo books to date.
Solo exhibitions include those at Side Gallery, The Royal Armouries Museum, Focal point Gallery in the UK, and Spazio Klien in Italy. Group shows include those at The Photographers Gallery and the Association of Photographers Gallery, London, and internationally at The Athens PhotoFestival and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His work has been published in numerous journals and magazines, from National Geographic and The British Journal of Photography and Raw Magazine to Wired and Dezeen.
