Twelve photographs comprising the collection titled "Return," by Sylvia de Swaan, a lecturer in art at Hamilton College, are featured in an exhibit at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Commercial Drive in New Hartford through July 30 in conjunction with a feature article on de Swaan and her work in the July/August issue of Black & White Magazine.
This collection chronicles the artist's return in the early 1990s to Europe, her home as a child living through the Holocaust. Each photograph reveals a different part of de Swaan's identity from her fractured past, and though all of the photographs were taken almost 50 years after de Swaan and her family left for a better life in the U.S., they still are reminiscent of the war-torn Europe of the 1940s.
Within "Return," de Swaan includes "The Remains of the Tree" (1992), which is a grouping of negatives portraying the faces of a family in a haunting image. "Bucharest to Cluj," (1994) "Cluj to Timisoara," (1994) "Prague to Berlin," (1994) and "Budapest to East Berlin," (1990) are all photographs depicting journeys, as they are taken on trains. Other photographs include "The War Game" (1994) and "Hidden Child."
-- by Katherine Trainor
