The past, according to the writer Walter Benjamin, is not something distant from us. Nor is there any version of history that could be called authentic or true. Instead, historical time is a fluid quality that exists only in confluence with the present, enfolded and encompassed by it.

Equally, there is no definitive past, no singular moment or event, to which a photograph refers. If the photographic image is to act as a historical index, Benjamin tells us, it only becomes legible or recognisable in relation to the present. Rather than belonging to the instant in which it was created and transporting this instant into the present, the historical image shows us a then through the lens of the now.

Since 2015, Jan Stradtmann has documented the region around the Vajont Dam in Northern Italy. The area is marked by a catastrophe – a confrontation between human ambition in the present, and the area’s complex geological past. Stradtmann’s photographs are not historical images, but they are tied to a singular historical event – the 1963 Vajont dam breach – which traverses any image he might make of the place. Here, in this place, the past is always present in the form of a single event with disastrous consequences – an event which is, in its totality, unknowable and unrepresentable. Stradtmann’s photographs speak of this historical past, without speaking from it.

‘One Moment’, in Calamita/á – An Investigation into the Vajont Catastrophe.
Fw:Books 2024
Softcover, 512pp
ISBN 9789083451022