The Day After
April 6 – 29, 2006
The Days After presents a striking series of superficially benign but deeply disturbing images through an ambitious, systematic study of the sites of terrorist activity around the world. Made sometimes days and sometimes years after these places were abruptly shattered by car bombs, gas attacks, or murder-suicide by plane or guided missile, Hepp’s edgy and impossible constructed panoramas conflate the specific moments of terrorist attack and the subsequent passage of time, thereby creating a powerful visual equivalent to the way of horrific events leave marks on memory long after they have occurred. These are photographs of street life as it has resumed, ominously underscoring the everyday risk-taking of shopping, riding a train, or going to work. The images are produced digitally, and montaged using up to twenty medium-format images, to depict multiple moments in time and challenge the conventions of the documentary. Printing nearly life size, Hepp draws us, his viewers, into his frame, making us witnesses, not only to the aftermath of violence that marks place and psyches, but to his own act of witness.
– Alison Nordstrom