Picturing Personal History: Sylvia de Swaan’s Return: The Landscape of Memory
By: Stacy J. Platt
Tags: Holocaust, Sylvia De Swaan, Refugees, Photography, Portfolio

How does one recollect a past that exists in sparse fragments? How does one begin to see and understand their own personal history — and that of one’s family — against the backdrop of an infamous genocide whose historical arc overshadows and encompasses millions of such stories? As a visual artist trying to describe their connection to this history, how does one work with material that isn’t there: the invisible, the unsaid, the unknown? And finally: how does one ever reconcile what sense they have made of their story, of those facts retrieved, re-collected and re-interpreted, with all of those other facts and individual tellings that they were never aware of and will never have access to? Is reconciling one’s truth with another’s even necessary, or the point? What does it mean to make up one’s own history as you go along?

Like the eponymous protagonist in W.G. Sebald’s masterwork Austerlitz, Sylvia de Swaan has kept appointments with the past, exploring personal interiority and history alongside a collectively experienced exterior reality. “Return: The Landscape of Memory,” exemplifies her process of engaging and transforming multiple narratives beyond both literal and imagined histories, working and re-working these over a period of decades.

Romanian-born and Jewish, de Swaan and her family were displaced and scattered throughout Eastern Europe’s refugee camps after WWII, and her mother, sister, maternal grandparents and she immigrated to the U.S. in 1951. Describing her arrival to America in that chaotic time, she discusses the few artifacts from their previous lives that served as the original DNA to the photographic project she would embark upon forty years later:

Some histories get irrevocably lost in the avalanche of war — the family tree uprooted, the branches scattered to the four winds. When my mother, sister and I arrived as stateless refugees in New York Harbor in 1951 we had only what we could carry — among which was a small wood and cloth suitcase, that we called “the rentzele (yiddish for little suitcase).” My mother managed to hang on to it all the way from our hometown in Northern Romania, through deportations, ghettos, concentration camps, refugee camps, and across the Atlantic Ocean on an American army ship to our new life. It contained birth certificates, marriage papers, a few family photos, a few valuables, all cleverly tucked away under a false bottom and hidden compartments that passed through multiple inspections undetected. It was the repository of all we had left of our family history and has served as the original context for this work.

“Return” weaves together the fragments of personal history within the larger fabric of the now collectively understood history of WWII’s holocaust. She has retraced the routes her family traversed as “displaced” persons throughout the period of the war, as well as found a generous community of strangers that share these histories and experiences and, in sharing those details with her, have further informed the more tangible and tactile gaps in her personal historiography, which in turn manifests itself as quiet revelations through her images.

There are certain recurrences we can count in de Swaan’s images and the miniature stories she gives us; among them are the ubiquity of hands and the depiction of modes of travel — airplanes and passenger trains, most notably. The former lends itself to an intimate contemplativeness: hands that are grasping, hands that are holding some unseen occurrence at bay, hands that are held against the windows of passenger trains or airplanes, hands that are gingerly — reverentially, even — holding a small family photograph up to the light to be better seen. These are the places where de Swaan has either inserted herself as herself into a re-imagined narrative, or one where she is a a stand-in actor for a re-enacted scene that happened to her or members of her family. The other recurrence, that of transportation, depicts the comings and goings of a protagonist that both is and is not us. It is shown variously as a yawning opening re-imagining our sense of vistas and possibilities outward beyond any truly visible horizon line; it is a voyeuristic vastness that has us both wondering and wishing for something private and unarticulated.