Interrogations

by Donald Weber, Larry Frolick (Afterword)

After a lone trip to Chernobyl in 2005, Donald Weber returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history.  Traveling and living with ordinary people who had endured much, and survived everything. Weber began to see the modern state as a primitive and bloody sacrifical rite of unnamed power.  INTERROGATIONS is the result of his personal quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the bloody 20th century. In dialogue with writer Larry Frolick - whose own ancestors had been decimated in the final months of WW II - Weber insistently and provocatively addresses his questions both to the living survivors and to the ghosts of the State's innumerable victims, resurrecting their final hours by taking their point of view, and performing a kind of incantatory meditation over their private encounters with power. The policeman, working girls, thugs, dissidents and hustlers who inhabit these pages are all orphans of a secret history; the outline of our collective fate takes shape in Weber's epic work, expanding our awareness of what it means to be an actor in today's dark opera.  

Genres: Photography

159 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2011

Reviews

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the nature of power. The trappings are cheap and brutal. The cover reflects the cheap wall covering of the interrogation room. There are two parts to the work - a prologue of beauty and majesty followed by the direct shots of interrogations in Ukranian police station(s). The manner and staging of the images deliberately puts a question on authenticity - a question that only adds to their power.