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Post-Socialist Landscapes

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Post-Socialist Landscapes is an exploration of memory sites in countries that were at one time occupied by the Soviet Union. The photographs in this project fall into two groups. One set of images, titled Scars, depicts the exact location where statues of Lenin and Stalin once stood. These photographs seem to portray obscure public squares or city parks, but to many local inhabitants, these spaces are still charged with an ominous presence. In some cases, the absence of the statue is more obvious, while in others the local government has gone to great lengths to transform the space. A second group of photographs, titled Idols, focuses on the fate of the discarded communist monuments that once stood throughout Europe's Eastern Bloc. Today they can be found stored behind buildings or gathered in private parks. Placed safely away from public view, their power to intimidate has been stripped from them. Some statues have even been sold to foreign collectors in the west and now stand in private sculpture gardens, like trophies of capitalism's victory in the Cold War. Together, these two groups of photographs speak to the way local governments and municipalities influence historical narratives through interventions in the landscape. This project also calls attention to the process happening in the U.S. and elsewhere with regards to the removal of monuments that propagate false histories. By looking at how societies in Europe have dealt with this issue more than thirty years after the fall of communism, the project provokes important questions about how other communities might deal with their own uncomfortable legacies.