Pre-hangout post for OCA Nov study group

Here are my pre-hangout questions. I've put them at the top of this post and before my explanation of my work for ease of reference during the hangout:

• Do I go with physical pyramid shapes or prints; or both?

• The title of the work is currently 'Unnatural'. 'Target Practice' has been suggested by the Brighton crit tutor Clive White in reference to a story I relayed from the biography. The title is dynamic and engaging but 'Unnatural' more fits the ethos of the dehumanised nature of the work.

• I like the idea of bigger physical pyramids (3 feet high) but am concerned about the logistics and costs?

The background to the work can be found here:

For my BoW I'm working on making constructed imagery to reference the treatment of Homosexual men that were incarcerated in concentration camps during WWII. I have done some tentative research and read a biography of one of the men published in 1972. From this starting point I made some constructed imagery, printed them out and began to fold them into triangles. I then re-photographed the physical triangles, placing them on a tiled effect background. I liked the fractured nature of the folded images. The triangles now present only parts of images (particularly the body parts) and this fits with my idea that in order to oppress people they first have to be dehumanised. I have also tried to isolate the triangles by photographing them against a 'clinical' background.

For more background there is a link to my assignment 1 here and a selection of images below:

assignment 1

Notes:

• I've had feedback from my tutor with some very useful points of reference to follow up and some further reading which I am about to undertake.
• I've finished the biography of the concentration camp survivor and this has thrown up a number of new images so I made some sketches.
• I'm also torn between the final prints and the physical triangles. The triangles are more tactile and I've also (since reading the biography) been thinking about making other shapes and creating an installation.
• The OCA crit at the recent Brighton Photo-Biennial was also useful. Clive White suggested the triangles would look good in a much larger physical form (about three feet high) and could imagine the viewer moving through them in a gallery space. I really like this idea and I agree that the tactical nature of the physical pyramids (as opposed to prints) is very appealing to me.

Update:

The session went well and the allocated hour went very fast indeed. Apart from the tutor Peter Haveland there was one other student (John Umney) beside myself. We discussed John's thinking around the curation of a contemporary landscape exhibition he will be putting together. I found Peter's suggestion on how to approach this very informative.

I presented my triangle work (the current working title is 'Unnatural' and may end up as 'Target Practice'). We discussed the problem of the re-photographed images looking flat as prints. They come alive as physical folded objects and this is very much in line with my thinking too. I am constantly drawn back to the physical pyramids/triangles; so much so that I hardly ever think about the prints now. We talked about size and scale of the objects themselves and the possible outcome for exhibition. One option that was suggested by both Peter and John was to use video to record the triangles in a space. By moving the camera around, the physicality of the objects would be much more apparent than in the prints. This is a very interesting idea; one that I hadn't quite reached in my own thinking at present as I am more consumed with just making more images at the moment. I will definitely experiment with video to see how it comes out.

I was also asked about the meaning behind the tiled backdrop for the print version of the work. I explained my thinking on this although how the work is read and perceived by the viewer will have different readings.

I found this session productive and will definitely join up to more hangouts in the future.

Documenting Nazi Persecution of Gays: Josef Kohout/Wilhelm Kroepfl Colle...

The Men with the Pink Triangle - Heinz Heger

The Men with the Pink Triangle (Heger, 1989.) is the first biography that tells of the atrocities committed on Homosexual men in concentration camps during World War II. The narrative is told from the perspective of Josef Kohout who at 22 years old was imprisoned under paragraph 175 of the Nazi's newly strengthened laws against homosexuality. His sexuality had been discovered because of a message Josef had written in a Christmas card to his lover. Kohout answered a knock at the door of his family home to a Nazi official, was ordered to report to a local interrogation centre, and was not seen by his mother again for over five years; by this time he was a broken man, both physically and mentally. His parents were ostracized by friends and neighbours because of their sons supposed 'crime' and Josef's father eventually committed suicide because he was unable to cope with the long suffering abuse. As a young man, full of hopes and dreams of becoming an architect, Josef left the house that day never to see his father again.

Once Josef returned home to his mother he had to again suffer under the identity of a 'homosexual degenerate criminal'; one enforced on him by the local people and he endured the shame of the judgement of others; people that had most likely participated (even by being neutral) in the Nazi regime in some form or another.

Josef was lucky. Many men convicted of homosexuality were returned to prison after their abuse and torture in the camps - their time having no effect on the length of sentence served. For these men there was no liberation after the war. This is a crime against humanity perpetrated by democratic countries and the war crimes tribunals who refused to even acknowledge that homosexual men had suffered as a group under the Nazi regime.

Many decades later Josef related his time in the camp to a close friend, detailing what he saw and experienced there. The book written under the pseudonym of Heinz Heger and making no mention of Josef's real identity was published in 1972. This is only a few years after the decriminalising of homosexuality (1969) in West Germany. It was important that Josef's identity even 30 years after these events unfolded be protected.

The 1970s was a time of political awakening for many LGBT people; after decriminalisation Gay people were openly coming together and taking a stance against majority cultural oppression and brutality. Dissemination of collated gay life experiences were helping to inform a political LGBT identity; they shone a light on the injustice that many had suffered and who had no-one to tell their tale. The Men with the Pink Triangle is a very important hidden history and I will be returning again to the events that took place in the camps to make images that will inform my body of work.



Heger, H. (1989). The Men With The Pink Triangle. London, UK: GMP Publishers Ltd.