The Landscape of Loss (Photographs by Jeff Gusky)

February 3 - June 9, 2002
East Gallery

ARTIST TALK AND RECEPTION: The Presence of Absence, Jeff Gusky, 2:00 pm. A reception will follow in the Marble Court featuring music by the University Chamber Orchestra

BURLINGTON, VT — On February 3, 2002, the Robert Hull Fleming Museum will present The Landscape of Loss, an exhibition of photographs by Dr. Jeff Gusky. A Texas emergency physician, Gusky has sought to capture the essence of the centuries-old Jewish culture destroyed in the Holocaust through black-and-white photographs created in the midst of the bleak Polish winter. Dr. Gusky believes that the images give voice to a murdered people. They evoke a visual confrontation with the aftermath of cataclysm: decaying Jewish settlements, desecrated synagogues and cemeteries, and death camps little-changed in fifty-six years. The photographs depict the vestiges of a once vibrant culture, frozen in time by decades of communism, poverty, geographic isolation, and the absence of living Jews.

In December of 1995, Dr. Gusky visited southeastern Poland in pursuit of a deeper personal understanding of his Jewish faith. What he found transformed him. He returned to Poland again and again, always in winter, in search of these haunted landscapes. The result is a body of work now consisting of 12,000 black-and-white negatives. The images are as beautiful and visually compelling as their subjects areprofoundly disturbing. They speak to the consequences of evil and the fragility of modern society. The Landscape of Loss will be accompanied by public programming presented in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Holocaust Studies. Events will include a slide talk by the artist discussing his experiences creating the work, an educator’s workshop, and lunchtime and evening talks by Holocaust scholars, art historians, and Bernard Gotfryd, photojournalist and Polish Holocaust survivor.