Richard Reisen
A 1987 post-documentary photographic project about the Holocaust. The authors Jeff B. Harmon and Richard Reisen.
Sunday, 07.11. | 15:00 - 15:45
In 1987, Poland was still under communist rule. My friend Jeff Harmon and I traveled to the "Land of Paradoxes." That's exactly how a train conductor greeted us as we crossed the border into Poland. I had met Jeff years earlier on a riverboat in Paraguay. He is of Jewish descent and our journey together was to take us to Nueva Germania in search of Dr. Josef Mengele, but that is another story.
At that time we decided to make a photo documentary about the Nazi death camps in Poland. Jeff was a documentary filmmaker whose war films about El Salvador and Afghanistan had already been broadcast by television stations. I was still relatively clueless and was studying with Rolf Sachsse in Krefeld at the time. The resulting work is divided into a color documentary section and a poetic-looking B/W section. The whole has a clearly cinematic character and proves, among other things, our intensive collaboration.
During our stay of several months in Poland we visited the former extermination camps (Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Stutthof). Robert Dannin, the former head of Magnum in New York, was very supportive of the project, as was Cornell Capa. After more than 30 years, we have now decided to publish the project.
"Uebergangsheim Schiessstrasse" book project about my time as a security guard in a Düsseldorf asylum seekers' home 1994
Exhibition in the Düsseldorf City Museum 2020, pictures DOMid eV, Cologne, author, Richard Reisen
The publication is available for sale.
https://www.facebook.com/richardreisen
The talk had to be canceled due to personal reasons.
