Maurice Schobinger is a Swiss photographer. His images echo a defining turning point for WWII in Eastern Europe. Sixty-five years on, they relate how memory imbibes and shapes certain areas. How the majority of the population of Volgograd carry with them memories of tragedies, how a city that is rebuilt can never again be a built one, how a river and its melancholy can remind us of heroic or fatal events.
The photos that make up the exhibition Stalingrad Volgograd were taken during Schobinger’s five trips to Volgograd between 2008 and early 2010. Through chance encounters, a diary kept by a friend’s family member was given to him. Its writer was a schoolteacher, a simple abandoned civilian, like so many others, that kept it during the bombardments of 1942. From reading its searing pages, the horror of the quotidian during the war and the voice of Serafima Fedorovna Voronina rises out and begs not to be forgotten. It then fall silent, abruptly, inferring a tragic end.
Pierre Starobinski
With the kind support of the Embassy of the Russian Federation. |
