War is Only Half the Story Vol II features the project's 2008 winner Kathryn Cook ("Memory Denied: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide") as well as work by special first finalist Natela Grigalashvili and finalists Tinka Dietz, Christine Fenzl and Pep Bonet.
Kathryn Cook's sublime black and white images tell the story of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Cook says in her introduction, "there are a few moments in a nation's history when it must come to terms with a set of beliefs that can no longer be considered the truth." She set out on an uneasy project, one that she describes as exploring "the remains and traces of an ambiguous, dark history - the definition of which is still being fought over."
The set of images that resulted require a deep, or at least for me, a second reading. They speak in low tones, and move as if they are brushing up against something. The cover image, so evocative. Disconnected wires. Birds that can't keep up with each other. Footprints in a snow-encompassed landscape.
It is followed by representations: an image from the 1915 deportation, and an image from a 2007 newspaper announcement addressing the genocide. Then a most Edenistic landscape, light bathing mountains and farmland. We find out it is a village almost completely depopulated in the genocide. The pictures continue to weave themselves, in and out of past and present.
What do these traces add up to? A realization that the places the victims left are still empty, still in ruins. Cook shows the marrow deep lack of even a pretense to this modern horror: no resource to hijack, no land to be occupied. Communities emptied in 1915 remain, not in a vacuum, not disappeared, but in a space unfilled. The traces of the routes of the deported linger in moments of recognition.
But it is within this space of recognition that the work must be done. "War is only half the story."
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