Marc Wilson documents the physical traces of the Holocaust

For six years, Marc Wilson has been working on a project documenting the physical traces of the Holocaust. Shot in more than 130 locations across 20 countries, the project has now been published as a 360-image book entitled A Wounded Landscape, designed by Wayne Ford. It also features compelling stories from 22 Holocaust survivors and their descendants, making it an empathetic and impactful tome, which forces viewers to confront an enduring atrocity. It asks us all to remember.

“The process of making the book was completely led by the stories,” Marc says. Avoiding the traditional format of a photobook, the team decided upon a more narrative-led documentation of peoples’ lives, where “each is a story of one person and their family”. As such, the work and stories shared comprehensively span the Holocaust over 20 years, visiting numerous sites in Germany (nearly 40,000 in total) which were under Nazi control between 1939 and 1945. “There, the Nazis and their collaborators systematically murdered nearly six million Jews as well as a huge number of people from other groups considered by the Nazis to be inferior, racially or for ideological or political reasons,” says Marc. This includes the Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, and the mentally and physically disabled, as well as Soviet prisoners of war. The sites still remain today and each is connected by landscapes and the “forced journeys” made between them. As Marc puts it: “These are sites where literal life or death decisions were made, but they are also sites of hope, survival and memory.”

It’s a sensitive subject matter to say the least, and the photographer wanted to avoid producing imagery that was objective, cold or voyeuristic. The solution was to tell the stories of his subjects and pair them with intimate portraiture, alongside shots of the local vicinity. He spoke with survivors and families including Rita, Harry and Lilian, plus many parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. “Each story was imprinted on my memory and I took these to each location I visited,” he says. “It pushed me with great urgency to make the work, and it also made it harder to do, to ‘fight’ with my camera through the emotions I had and experienced on site.”

A Wounded Landscape is a fine example of photography’s dual role, both documenting particular people, places and events, and offering deeper messages. While as a viewer there is plenty to learn from the project, Marc himself has had an eye-opening experience in the process. Looking back, he remembers an hour spent walking around human bone fragments at a former camp at Chelmno and the Rzuchowski forest in Poland. “After trying so hard to make work here, which I did, handheld, (shaking) crying onto the ground glass screen viewfinder of my camera, I did not know if I could continue. But of course I had no choice.” Marc addressed his position as a documenter, and simply couldn’t walk away from these experiences; he needed to share the stories he was told and to help the viewer understand their impact. “We could so easily have been, or could become, these stories,” he says.

So what does he hope to achieve from A Wounded Landscape? “The single response I want is a response: not to walk past, not to look away, not to turn a blind eye but to look, to think, to talk, to share. I see each viewer of the work and each reader of the book as having this important part to play by talking about it to others.”