Award-winning Genocide Artist, Barry Salzman, Turns Lens on the 'American Dream' in Exhibition of The Other Side of Christmas
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, Oct. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Barry Salzman works in photography, video and mixed media and lives between New York City and Cape Town. His photographic work began with a fascination for the practice as a teenager, when it served as a way to grapple with racial segregation in apartheid South Africa.
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Today, his work continues to explore challenging themes around social, political and economic narratives. Acutely relevant, and brave in its willingness to confront, Salzman's photography garnered the 2018 International Photographer of the Year Award in the Deeper Perspective category at the International Photography Awards for his project, The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim.
For the last six years, Salzman has worked on ongoing projects that challenge the universal fatigue around the genocide narrative. Mostly, he applies tools of abstraction to landscape images shot at precise locations where acts of genocide were perpetrated as a means of reminding us that 'that place' can be 'any place'.
Salzman says, "For a decade after leaving South Africa, I wanted nothing more than to become an American. I celebrated when I became a citizen. But every time I proclaimed to be 'American' people doubted me. I had an accent. I didn't fit with my fellow Americans' sense of what it meant to be 'American'. So I set out to explore the label. I wanted to pierce the veil of America's official image of equality and opportunity, comfort and confidence - 'the land of the free and the home of the brave'." This tension bleeds into his work and forms the basis for his exhibition, The Other Side of Christmas.
He set out across the Southern USA, documenting his observations through the lens and building a substantial body of work exploring and responding to this stimulus. Salzman examines the uncelebrated parts of America not promulgated through its well-crafted media image. Prescient in its timing, the project, shot between the 2014 American midterm elections and Christmas that year, reflects the country's prevailing temperament as precursor to the divisive 2016 Presidential elections.
Contemporary art commentator Ashraf Jamal describes Salzman's The Other Side of Christmas as "a sobering reminder that there is no indifferent place" (using the description by poet Rainer Maria Rilke). "No matter how dispassionate or detached our everyday encounters might appear, it is within these fleeting moments that our existence assumes its deepest traction. We know ourselves best not through special or extraordinary circumstances, but in-and-through the indifferent bilge and bric-a-brac which is the binding sump of life."
The Other Side of Christmas will be showing at Deepest Darkest gallery in Cape Town from 7 November to 28 December 2019: https://www.deepestdarkestart.com/.
About the artist: http://www.barrysalzman.net/
Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1017423/Abdallas.jpg
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