© Manca Juvan

Usually photography is about capturing this key moment, the "now" in an unfolding event. In this photographic project, it's equally if not more about confronting the past.

In a way, Remembering fascist camps project is a continuation of my previous long term project Unordinary Lives that speaks about the war and its consequences on civilian population; they both address the war trauma and bring out things that are usually unpleasant to address or to look at.

While in Afghanistan the war is ongoing and still very much part of the 'present', in Slovenia the war our project refers to is practically a reality of seven decades ago. However, the long term consequences of it, the trauma transferred through generations, is still much a thing of the present.

Photography is surely not a perfect medium - as written or oral testimonies aren't either. Consequently it has been, unjustly, a subject of much critic by modernist and post-modernist critics for its anti-analytical nature. If we expect that photographs explain us how and why things happen(ed), elucidate bad things that people do to each other, and not just to document it, we often forget that it is photography more than any other medium that brings out our visceral feelings. Maybe we can't articulate them instantly or well, but, I believe that this is a condition for one, for the viewer, to connect with what Roland Barthes called "the thereness of the world." Moreover, by joining various narrative perspectives in this project we hope to add to the stories we're telling another dimension.

Hanna Arendt in her writing about Aushwitz called photographs "instants of truth", and added that such instants, though not absolute or perfect, "are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror." 

That's why looking at what photographs communicate, I belive, and not getting trapped by deconstructing them in sense of technical or aesthetic measures, is all the more necessary.