Some of the images feature in more than one gallery.
'The Unwanted' title refers to the shutting away and abandonment by the country. The work was made near Linz, Austria, in the 1970s in what was referred to as a 'children's' home, though some of the 'children' had become adults many years ago. The location was a small village near the Iron Curtain border with the former Czechoslovakia. The home was run by a charity with what seemed to be minimal resources and relied on people like my brother on VSO gap years to assist the staff who were clearly very devoted to the 'children'. I have not been back, but indications are that additional funding and a greater acceptance by society over people who had disabilities had resulted in many improvements. When I went some of the 'children' did not have any family visitors and I was told one had never been in a car until he went out with us (and a worker) to a nearby village.
The first and second World Wars are in the distant past, but only now are we beginning to uncover some of the horrors perpetrated by both sides in the pursuit of victory and often name of 'science' . I was told that one of the elderly 'children' had apparently been the subject of medical brain experiments - of the 'how much can be removed and the 'patient' still survive type' at the nearby Mauthausen Concentration Camp and he reacted strongly whenever the name was mentioned. At Mauthausen the mortuary dissection table, looking's if it was a billiard table with a groove in the middle, is still at the camp - a most chilling place to be because it was prepared to look 'as new': just like the original inhabitants would have seen when they arrived. I was the last visitor to leave that night and the noise of the main gates being shut was a grim reminder of what it would have been like to be incarcerated there. A few years ago some of the former inhabitants gave a concert in the very quarry where they had previously been forced to work lifting heavy blocks of stone up the difficult steps.
The images were mostly made in medium format colour film, with some in 35mm black and white, I had printed contact sheets but not done anything further until 2000, and even then when going through the images I found them to be painful reminder of how people suffer.
The first and second World Wars are in the distant past, but only now are we beginning to uncover some of the horrors perpetrated by both sides in the pursuit of victory and often name of 'science' . I was told that one of the elderly 'children' had apparently been the subject of medical brain experiments - of the 'how much can be removed and the 'patient' still survive type' at the nearby Mauthausen Concentration Camp and he reacted strongly whenever the name was mentioned. At Mauthausen the mortuary dissection table, looking's if it was a billiard table with a groove in the middle, is still at the camp - a most chilling place to be because it was prepared to look 'as new': just like the original inhabitants would have seen when they arrived. I was the last visitor to leave that night and the noise of the main gates being shut was a grim reminder of what it would have been like to be incarcerated there. A few years ago some of the former inhabitants gave a concert in the very quarry where they had previously been forced to work lifting heavy blocks of stone up the difficult steps.
The images were mostly made in medium format colour film, with some in 35mm black and white, I had printed contact sheets but not done anything further until 2000, and even then when going through the images I found them to be painful reminder of how people suffer.
