...///...
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

from Book 1, The Book Of The Dead,
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot.

...///...These pictures are the landscapes of the places at which there have been genocides. I want to make pictures that portray the deathly emptiness that one encounters at these sites, using the visual economy of black and white and the austerity of the square format. A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less cliched than a 'noisier' photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not 'documentary' in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces. In somewhere like Rwanda these traces are all too obvious - chaotic churches still filled with rotting bodies of the victims. Further back in history this evidence becomes harder to discern, but once found it can be a powerful indicator of the terrible suffering to which the landscape has been witness:- a staircase at Auschwitz worn away by thousands of miserable, aching footsteps; a line of saplings in eastern Turkey that delineates the route that a million Armenians were driven to their deaths.

Were we ignorant of what happened in such places, the sunlit snows of eastern Anatolia and the patterned sand of the Namibian desert might seem sublime. But since we know what nature has witnessed, nature loses its innocence. The desolation in these photographs is beautiful, but their beauty is suspect. In this way the pictures are about landscape photography itself.

And these pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.

And these pictures are about godlessness. Here is an anecdote:
A young Catholic priest was sent as a missionary to Rwanda - a bright, white idealist sent to win the hearts and minds of this small African backwater. He went to be God's witness but instead ended up a witness to genocide. He saw his church, the House of God, become a charnel house and members of his own flock, people he thought he knew, become the butchers. Women and children were slaughtered in the one place they thought the killers would respect. A massacre of the innocents. Barbarism. Some weeks later he recounted his painful story to a journalist. At the end of the interview, the reporter became discursive and asked this broken man if the genocide had made him lose his faith in God. The priest replied, "No, of course not," then his indignance evaporated as he paused, and added quietly, with sadness, "but I have lost my faith in Humanity forever."