Published by Parthian. Foreword by John Humphrys. Text by Melanie Doel, Chris Townsend.
In October of 1966, a coal waste tip slipped down the mountainside above the Welsh village of Aberfan and buried its school, killing 116 children. Within hours, the worldwide news media descended upon the village, stripping away any sense of deserved privacy and rendering "the village that lost its children" a perennial destination for disaster tourism. Shimon Attie's sensitive portrayal of Aberfan today takes the form of a five-channel high definition video installation and a body of still photographs in which the villagers "perform" being themselves, in terms of their social or occupational roles. Thus, Attie subsumes the story of the disaster below a contemporary art historical narrative that helps normalize how the village is represented. This volume presents both photographs and video stills. It comes with a DVD featuring the award winning BBC documentary An American in Aberfan, as well as a short film representing the installation.
PUBLISHER Parthian
BOOK FORMAT Hardback, 12.5 x 10.75 in. / 108 pgs / 84 color / DVD (NTSC).
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/1/2008 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2008 p. 129
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781905762408TRADE List Price: $80.00 CDN $95.00
"For a number of years, Shimon Attie (born 1957) has created his own photographic palimpsests, projecting historical images onto public spaces and then photographing them, trying to bring out buried layers of memory. 'I am trying to give visual form to history and memory which is latent in the architecture and landscape of the present, latent but not visible ... More than my therapeutic training, I think my temperament made me interested in revealing layers of a buried or repressed past.' The projected image, Attie says, is a physical embodiment of the process of memory itself. 'Like memory, the projection appears to have substance and materiality, but in fact it does not—it is only photons,' he says. 'It’s an illusion.' The projections of historical photographs onto actual sites in the present have a ghostly, immaterial, ephemeral quality of fleeting memory." — Alexander Stille
Shimon Attie: The History of Another