Award-winning genocide artist, Barry Salzman, turns lens on the ‘American Dream’ in exhibition of The Other Side of Christmas

Cape Town, October 28, 2019 -- Barry Salzman is an award-winning contemporary artist who currently works in photography, video and mixed media and whose projects have been shown widely around the world.  He lives and works between New York City and Cape Town, South Africa.  His photographic work in particular, began with a fascination for the practice as a teenager, during a time when it served as a way for him to grapple with the racial segregation in apartheid South Africa.

Today, his work continues to explore challenging themes around social, political and economic narratives, often coming down to the core concept of identity.  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, that endeavors to humanize victims of the Rwandan genocide.

For the last six years, Salzman has worked on ongoing projects that attempt to challenge the universal fatigue around the genocide narrative.  Mostly, he applies visual tools of abstraction to landscape images shot at precise locations around the world where acts of genocide were perpetrated, as a means of reminding us that ‘that place’ can be ‘any place’. 

In writing about his ongoing genocide landscape work Salzman says, “The lanscape witnesses all.  It sheds its leaves in cover-up and complicity.  But through its rebirth, so it rejuvenates.  It carries with it the traces of the past and promises of the future.  It triumphs over trauma.  It is inextricably intertwined with our darkest moments and brightest days.”

Select downloadable images from recent Rwandan genocide landscape work below.

Born in Zimbabwe, Salzman’s family relocated to South Africa, but he elected to leave the country in the mid 1980s, and moved to New York City.  His experience of the USA has largely been limited to Manhattan, with the artist identifying more as a New Yorker than an American, despite being a naturalized citizen.  He struggled to assimilate into American culture, often identifying as “foreign” to his fellow Americans – a tension which bleeds into his work and forms the basis for his upcoming exhibition, The Other Side of Christmas, to be shown at Deepest Darkest Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa this festive season.

In his artist statement for the show, Salzman writes: “For a decade after leaving South Africa, I wanted nothing more than to become an American.  I celebrated when I became a US 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 what that label meant.  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’.”

To do so, 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.  In The Other Side of Christmas, Salzman mines numerous themes – identity, place, belonging - and in large part examines the uncelebrated parts of America not promulgated through its well-crafted media image.

He began working on the resulting series around the time of the 2014 American midterm elections, the precursor to the divisive 2016 Presidential elections, and continued through Christmas of that year.  Now, in 2019, the series has become even more pointed, not just in the America of the Trump administration, where issues of identity, naturalization, citizenship and belonging are so heightened; but across the socio-political globe, in a world irrevocably affected by mass movements of refugees and asylum seekers.  The Other Side of Christmas’s penetrating gaze can indeed be extrapolated outwards.

In its stylistic execution, the photographic series draws on the rich tradition of the road trip – that journey of discovery that the open road presents and its capacity to facilitate understanding. Salzman states: “As I traversed the country, it was blatantly apparent that for many Americans, perhaps even the majority, the lives they live have little bearing on the promise of that often romanticized dream held by so many who seek to be ‘American’.”

An historic and defining example of the road trip across America as the subject and vehicle of the documentarian is provided by Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank – specifically, his work in 1955 to 1956.  Indeed, Frank inspired subsequent explorations by many other photographers, including Salzman, who duly credits Frank as an influence.

Frank’s ambition for “observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United States...” was instrumental in terms of his memorialization of the everyday: “I speak of the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere - easily found, but not easily selected and interpreted.” The same level of engagement and intense powers of observation are revealed in Salzman’s own ouevre.

Select downloadable images from The Other Side of Christmas below