Contact Sheet 143: One Week's Dead. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Contact Sheet 143: One Week's Dead

This catalogue features the work of photographer Binh Danh. Regardless of generation, cultural background, or level of direct involvement, we cannot escape being touched by the faces in Binh Danh s series, titled One Week s Dead. Danh collects photographs and other remnants of the Vietnam War and re-processes them in a way that brings new light to a history marked by painful memories. A main source of the images is the 1969 Life magazine article, Faces of the American Dead: One Week s Dead. Portraits of two hundred forty-two young American men, casualties in one week of the war, were presented in a yearbook-style layout, triggering a powerful public response: "the entire nation mourned those soldiers...you saw those faces, that s what brought it home to everyone."* Danh uses photosynthesis to incorporate these portraits in the cells of leaves and grasses, symbolic of the jungle itself bearing witness to scars of war that remain in the landscape. Danh is reconstructing histories that occurred before he was born, but have undoubtedly affected him. He was less than two years of age when his parents and siblings escaped their home in Vietnam to establish a new home in the United States. Rather than being caught in the pain of the past, he has transformed the experience into one that takes no sides, reminding us that wars may end, but they are never over. Nearly forty years later we are like the readers of Life magazine in 1969 held captive by Danh s resurrection of the young men s faces. Viewing Danh s fragile and sometimes faint forms rendered by sunlight onto leaves and grass, we are made aware of the permanence of even one human life lost. The catalogue includes an introduction by Laura A. Guth. *1. Barbara Baker Burrows, "Photography Transformed, 1960-1999" from American Photography: A Century of Images, PBS, 1999.