Martin Roemers: The Eyes of War

Martin Roemers’s The Eyes of War grew from a portrait of a person blinded during the Second World War, a face in which Roemers found something larger than one biography. From there he went looking for others: people who had lost their sight as children in wartime or as young soldiers, and who carried that injury into their later lives. The Eyes of War presents around forty of them, drawn from a much larger group he sought out across Europe.

The publication combines around forty portraits with accompanying interviews, so the book is as much spoken record as it is a body of photographs. The sitters talk; Roemers photographs. Cees Nooteboom contributes a foreword and the photographer adds texts of his own. The volume is published in German, English and Dutch, an arrangement that suits a subject crossing borders by definition: those portrayed come from Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ukraine and Russia, places divided by wartime allegiances. The book brings together survivors injured as children or young soldiers through the shared aftermath of blindness.

That levelling is where the book’s weight lies. Its title is a metaphor the photographs keep literal — sight gone, the war still legible in a face. The portraits decline to rank victor above defeated; what remains is a shared physical circumstance and a set of separate memories, each with its own accent and detail. The traces of the war may seem to have faded from view; these faces are among the places they have not.

Hatje Cantz issued the book in 2012: 128 pages, hardcover, 246 × 286 mm, edited by Nadine Barth and Maartje Wildeman, designed by Julia Wagner of grafikanstalt with Hans van Blommestein. It appeared alongside an exhibition at the Kunsthal Rotterdam, 3 May–26 August 2012. What earns it a collector’s attention is the pairing of portrait and interview, through which survivors of the war are treated as particular people rather than as illustrations of history.

Over the past few decades, the traces of World War II only appear to have become invisible. The horror can still be seen in the stories told by survivors—their eyes reflect the terror and trauma of a childhood spent in wartime. In his picture of a blind war victim, photographer Martin Roemers (*1962 in Oldehove) discovered a haunting metaphor for the depths of the human soul in general, and consequently found thousands of people who lost their eyesight when they were children or young soldiers during the war. Featuring around forty portraits and accompanying interviews, this publication remembers the forgotten while at the same time transcending their individual stories of suffering. Formerly bitter foes from Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ukraine, and Russia are united in their fate as blind persons and victims of the war,
 
Exhibition schedule: Kunsthal Rotterdam, May 3–August 26, 2012

Edited by: Nadine Barth, Maartje Wildeman
Designed by: Julia Wagner, grafikanstalt, Hans van Blommestein
Texts by: Martin Roemers u.a.
Vorwort von: Cees Nooteboom
German, English, Dutch
May 2012, 128 Pages , 40 Photos
hardcover
246mm x 286mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3400-4

Publisher page editorial text:
Over the past few decades, the traces of World War II only appear to have become invisible. The horror can still be seen in the stories told by survivors—their eyes reflect the terror and trauma of a childhood spent in wartime. In his picture of a blind war victim, photographer Martin Roemers (*1962 in Oldehove) discovered a haunting metaphor for the depths of the human soul in general, and consequently found thousands of people who lost their eyesight when they were children or young soldiers during the war. Featuring around forty portraits and accompanying interviews, this publication remembers the forgotten while at the same time transcending their individual stories of suffering. Formerly bitter foes from Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ukraine, and Russia are united in their fate as blind persons and victims of the war,
 
Exhibition schedule: Kunsthal Rotterdam, May 3–August 26, 2012

Publisher source ↗