Sara Davidmann

In The Artist’s Studio: Sara Davidmann talks about My Name is sara and Mischling 1

Marianne Hirsch on My name is Sara

“Based on extensive family, archival and legal research, and an intense desire to feel and to transmit the visceral effects of the deadly system to which her family was subject, Davidmann mobilises an array of photographic techniques to engage with archives of pre-Nazi German-Jewish lives and their destruction. Engaging with them, for Davidmann, means to reprocess and re-present them in what I would suggest is liquid time. 

Even as Davidmann darkens, scratches, marks, unmakes and remakes prewar images of daily life in tintypes and chemigrams, the artist donates her own blood and hair to make new images of recognition, tribute and survival. We could think of this embodied performance as a way to enter the history, to feel it viscerally and to find a form through which to transmit its profound and wide-ranging transgenerational effects.  

In this project, Davidmann alters images not to repair but to destroy them… This is what it means to witness destruction and absence transgenerationally, Davidmann seems to say.  When people are violently destroyed are not their earlier images also somehow marked by their later fate? Can we look back at a pre-war moment without allowing our knowledge of what was to come circumscribe our vision?

Davidmann would suggest not. And she suggests that the photographic medium itself, by showing only normalcy and ordinariness, is implicated in obscuring the devastation that ensued, that was already preparing itself. Photography enables a return to a prewar past, a making present of that past, that obscures the violent annihilation that should not be so easily bridged.  Davidmann’s work contests that occlusion and forces us to confront it.  

And yet, in her work, even the digital images are not completely destroyed, not even the burned ones. Inevitably, in each image, something indestructible remains. A look, a smile, a gesture. Like the blood that marks continuity, the images also continue to live even as they burn. Or rather, they live again.”

Marianne Hirsch 2022

*Cover photograph of Sara Davidmann in her studio by Hen Norton