Journal

Originally exhibited as an installation, this work by artists Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat captures three temporal layers in one shot. First, there is the handheld camera moving along a series of photos of official visits to the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. The dignitaries themselves are looking at the iconic image that sums up the Holocaust, a barrack in Buchenwald concentration camp full of emaciated prisoners looking straight into the lens. It was taken by an American soldier named H. Miller five days after the liberation of the camp. Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s father’s photographic archive forms the basis of Journal, just as it did for their Printed Matter. André Brutmann was a freelance photographer in the Middle East, and between 1986 and 2000 he often shot official visits to Yad Vashem. Efrat and Brutmann made a selection of photos from this extensive series, and in January 2013, they hung them and videoed them at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels. The result is a multilayered video in which they play with time, movement and point of view. There is silence all around: the only sound is of the cameraman breathing. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)