JAN VAN LEEUWEN

BARBED WIRE

ARTIST STATEMENT

6,000,000

you may regard the figure

6,000,000

as drops of the see

as so many times ten

I, who was born

a generation earlier,

cannot see this figure

unprejudiced

to me six million

alas is not a figure

but an experience

so big so black so cruel

because i know behind that figure

written down so unimaginatively

a horrible and cloudy

calculated end

               - Ida Vos, 1975

Seeing images of Yugoslavian concentration camps in the early 1990’s served as a catalyst in the creation of the “Barbed Wire” Series. This News, coupled with his childhood memories and Ida Vos’ poetry, led Jan van Leeuwen to produce this series of ten cyanotypes that both serve as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and cry out in protest against the resurgence of discrimination and extermination among ethnic groups.

Although van Leeuwen is the model in each image, the series is far from self-portraiture. He places himself just on the “other side” of the wire with his nose pressed against the fence. Shortly after the war, van Leeuwen learned, through films and pictures, of the fate of several friends whose disappearances occurred right before his eyes.

The sequence of images behind barbed wire unfolds with a multitude of figures that represent the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The phantom-like figures in these photographs follow in the footsteps of the Holocaust’s concentration camp victims. The terrifying phrase “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Makes You Free”, which was written above the en¸trance gate at several camps, is harshly contradicted by the second photograph of marching figures struggling to carry heavy stones. Upon arrival at the camps, victims were “selected” for either immediate death by gas or delayed death by starvation and forced labor. In the third image, the cruel hook of the cane rounds up a prisoner for “selection”. The following three images illustrate this process as prisoners are sent “Left!” to the gas chamber, or”Right!” to slave labor. Forms of resistance are suggested through the images of a prisoner’s trembling hands. Despite the allusion to liberation by the broken barbed wire, the final image exposes the continuation of events that mirror those of the Holocaust and present a penetrating warning for the future.