..November 2016.. ..Nagasaki..
From Above will be exhibited at the Nagasaki National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims as a part of 2016 Nagasaki International Peace Film Forum. The opening is on December 10th and the exhibition runs through December 25th.
The project hasn’t been exhibited in Nagasaki for two years so there are plenty of new portraits that will be shown for the first time in Japan.
..November 2016.. ..Dresden..
I recently found out that Mr. Rudolf Eichner passed away. He was one of the first fire bombing survivors I photographed in Dresden.
Mr. Eichner was photographed holding a chess piece that was given to him by his father while he was staying at the hospital. His father regularly visited him to play chess.
The hospital was destroyed by the second wave of bombers on February 13th, 1945. The injured struggled to scramble out of the hospital. Rudolf and a few others sought refuge in a nearby garden where they were cornered by the growing firestorm.
Every year on the anniversary of the bombings Rudolf returned to the spot where he had fought the inferno. Three years later, February 13th, 1948, he found a chess piece, a black knight, from the chess set destroyed by the flames.
Mr. Eichner was a proud man who rigorously fought during the DDR times and after unification for recognition of those who perished in the destruction of Dresden.
..October 2016.. ..Dresden..
One of the few remaining sculptures made in the DDR times. Most of the signs of the DDR are found on the quiet back streets of Johannstadt, away from the city center where the tourists flock to see the baroque heart of Dresden.
..October 2016.. ..Prague..
Memorial to the Victims of Communism.
..October 2016.. ..Rotterdam…
I received the sad news that Mr. Adriaan de Winter passed away earlier this year. Mr. de Winter was a Rotterdam fire bombing survivor I photographed during January 2015 for From Above.
As a 14 year old, Mr. de Winter learned about the harsh reality of war immediately. On the second day of the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, his house was destroyed. Four days later on May 14th, 1940 the house his family was staying in was smashed during the great air raid of Rotterdam. For the second time his family lost everything and that was just the start of the war.
During the occupation, Mr. de Winter was a member of the resistance. He and his father risked their lives secretly radioing Nazi positions to the Allied forces during air raids. While everyone was hiding in cellars during Allied raids they were transmitting coded messages near windows with small hand set radios.
After being caught he was sent to an internment camp where he escaped while being transported by cattle car. He managed to walk through most of the country reaching the Allied lines in Belgium. He fought bravely along side Scottish Rangers as the Allies advanced closer to the Netherlands. At the end of the war he witnessed the V2 revenge bombings in Antwerp and had the grisly experience of clearing dead bodies after one scored a direct hit on a movie theater.
I consider myself lucky to have spent time with Mr. de Winter. He experienced more as a boy than most do in a lifetime. It was an honor to have known him.
..October 2016.. ..Dresden..
It’s abandoned…
It’s forgotten…
Sculpture made in the East German times sit lonely on the outskirts of the Dresden Neumarkt.
“In the fall of 1982, six months after I arrived in Berlin, I started to have doubts about my job. Most importantly I felt we were engaging in certain activities to achieve specific intelligence goals without regard to the risk, no matter if it cost lives or pushed us closer to nuclear war. I felt we were sacrificing our morality for an end result. In the media we were presented with distorted statistics that gave the impression that the West was doomed and that we would be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers in the event of war. But it was never mentioned that those statistics were often negated by Western technology. ”
-Jens Karney
Jens Karney, code-named “Kid,” was one of a pair of agents the Stasi had used to infiltrate the US military in West Berlin during the 1980’s. American authorities estimated the damage that he had caused by betraying secrets at $14.5 billion.
