Vanishing

Engraved in ghostly black and white, Anna Arendt’s debut mono-graph, Vanishing, conjures a world of dreamlike dread and beauty.Arendt was born in the German Democratic Republic. She was 24 when The Wall fell, her daughter was 2. Her parents were born 1940 in Germany, children of war. Both of her grandfathers had been soldiers, who had been in Poland between 1940 and 1942.

One came back 2 years after the war was over, the other one never returned. Arendt later discovered that her husband’s father, photographer Sid Grossman’s family came from the area in Poland that her two grand-fathers were sent during the war.As a child, she found a secret shelf that contained photo albums of her family. “It is where I discovered the power of a picture. A picture taken in summer 1940. A young family, my grandmother, her baby and my grandfather in a German uniform. A picture full of contra-dictions, carrying ambivalent feelings even until today."

Photographed mostly between Germany and Poland over 15 years, the work slides back and forth through time like a blood memory. Walking naked through the dark forest, wolves circling, howling. A daughter becoming a mother becoming a grandmother becoming a child. Haunted villages, and souls in jeopardy. The harsh reality of the past merges seamlessly with moments of rapture that feel plucked from a Grimm fairy tale.