Looking back
This sequence of black and white images is based on a poem by Nazim Hikhmet,
“Things I didn’t know I loved”. Hikhmet, a Turkish Kurdish political activist, spent
over 15 years of his life in prison and had to emigrate to escape political persecution.
The poem is based on a train journey Hikhmet undertook from Prague to Berlin a year
before he died. The Prague Berlin train would have passed through Dresden, and
would have arrived in East Berlin. The poem was written in 1961, a year after the
Berlin Wall had gone up and only 17 years after the end of the Second World War.
The choice of extracts and the sequencing of images tells the story of someone
remembering fragments of their life. The images are washed out at the edges and
the sequencing suggest a journey that leads to destruction but ends in hope. Most
of the images are extracts of photographs taken by the photographers Lee Miller,
Richard Petersen and Friederich Seidenstuecker in Berlin and Dresden in 1946. The
closing image, of a mother and son embracing, was taken by Miller in 1945 and pictures
a mother and son separated during the war but reunited in a camp. There is one photo,
of a young woman, which Julia found in an old photo album (dated 1935) bought
in a charity shop. The album ends abruptly in 1935 and there are no clues as to the
woman’s identity.
