Die Übrigen

Die Übrigen takes Latvia as a terrain of overlapping remembrance. Anastasia Khoroshilova photographs a country where Latvians, Germans, Russians, and Jews have left their marks between the Baltic Sea and vast forests, and where individual and collective memories—good and bad—remain part of the landscape. The book appeared in 2014, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its central question is how dissimilar memories can look when they are set alongside one another.

Khoroshilova supplies the photographs; Annabel von Gemmingen contributes texts; Anne Maier edited the volume and wrote its foreword. Hatje Cantz published it as a 176-page softcover, 160 by 240 millimeters, with 41 photographs and texts in German, English, Latvian, and Russian. That multilingual apparatus belongs to the edition, and it suits a project whose subject is not a single voice but a field of accounts. Hermann Hülsenberg is credited with the design.

The book works through two vantage points. Photographs and texts approach Latvian history from different poles and repeatedly readjust their angle, so that the result is less a fixed verdict than an attempted objectifying view of events. It developed, almost en passant, into a photo-essay that brings personal testimony into contact with broader social narrative. For a collector, the interest lies in that conjunction: a photographer’s investigation of memory and place, paired with written contributions that hold the photographic account open to multiple perspectives.

Die Übrigen is a multilingual record of a specific historical moment—the quarter-century after 1989–91—and of a region where memory is layered by several communities. Its 41 photographs and four-language text make it a considered acquisition for collections attentive to documentary photography, post-Soviet histories, and the photo-essay as a form for thinking through contested remembrance.

Latvia is not only a breathtakingly beautiful country, but also rich in individual and collective memories – good and bad. Latvians, Germans, Russians, and Jews have left their mark here between the shores of the Baltic Sea and vast forests. Anastasia Khoroshilova (*1978 in Moscow) and Annabel von Gemmingen (*1979 in Düsseldorf) explore, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, how diverse memories can be. In photographs and texts, the artists examine history from two different poles and repeatedly readjust their perspective in various directions, thus creating an objectifying interpretation of events. Unexpectedly and rather en passant, a photo-essayistic project developed that combines personal accounts with societal narratives.

Edited by: Anne Maier
Designed by: Hermann Hülsenberg
Texts by: Annabel von Gemmingen
Vorwort von: Anne Maier
German, English, Latvian, Russian
November 2014, 176 Pages , 41 Photos
softcover
160mm x 240mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3934-4

Publisher page editorial text:
| Latvia between yesterday and today
Latvia is not only a breathtakingly beautiful country, it is also rich in individual and collective memories—bad as well as good. Latvians, Germans, Russians, and Jews have left their marks here between the strands of the Baltic Sea and vast forests. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the following collapse of the Soviet Union, Anastasia Khoroshilova (*1978 in Moscow) and Annabel von Gemmingen (*1979 in Düsseldorf) examine how dissimilar memories can look. The artists view history in photographs and texts from the vantage point of two different poles, continuously readjusting their gaze in changing directions so that an objectivizing version of events is created. A photo essay project develops, more as if en passant, that combines personal with social narratives.

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