Curatorial text by Irene Alison

Is there still a possible way to photograph war? Is there a language to visually return trauma, violence, conflict, in a world saturated with images for whose complexity traditional photojournalism no longer seems to be an effective tool of interpretation? Is there a duty of photography to continue to question how to tell the story of pain? But most importantly: do images of horror make us more aware of the horrors we are capable of generating? And is this awareness in any way helpful to us in avoiding them? With Kowitsch – Lonely Are All The Bridges, German photographer Robin Hinsch discloses to our eyes the devastation of a theater of war in which only rubble remains, with the rigor of one who has chosen a side – on the side of the vanquished – and the discretion of one who has no truth to reveal, but knows how to put himself in a listening position.

In his pictures, which are part of a long investigation of Ukraine’s conflicts going back to 2010, war has the face of an exhausted soldier collapsed on a bench, surrounded by a haunting landscape lying hushed beneath the snow. It has the irregular outlines of a bombed-out cathedral. With his personal exhibition, the voyage around the idea of home undertaken with the Homecoming cycle turns into a bitter reflection on the absence of a home to which to return: destroyed, reduced to rubble, abandoned. The houses of Kowitsch – Lonely Are All The Bridges are inhabited only by ghosts.

Yet, the frescos that Hinsch creates have a hypnotic vitality and beauty that goes beyond the contemplation of disaster, where we seem to hear, in the almost surreal silence of the scenes, all the echoes of the insanity of war and the hope of a future that can sprout new green shoots even where “home” is no more than a heap of dust.

Such images, then, we need. More than fifty years later, John Berger’s 1972 analysis of the “photography of agony,” which, as the shock of the reader/viewer wanes, “completely loses its political significance and becomes an indictment of everyone and no one,” still sounds quite convincing. So is Susan Sontag’s famous argument that the spectacle of other people’s pain produces habituation and that “the huge photographic catalog of misery has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrific seem more normal, making it familiar, distant and inevitable.” But, far from the (often) suffocating immediacy of photojournalism, Hinsch’s images open instead a space for thought and understanding: they are no less painful than those that dwell on the most unwatchable atrocities of conflicts, but in their slower pace, in their apparent detachment, they show how awareness is a long process and how History, often, can teach us something only when looked at in perspective. Looking at them, we are stunned by the destruction they witness but, precisely because they do not leave us breathless with horror, we have the breath to find within them useful clues to understanding the world we live in, and the wars we still fight.