Exposing violence, amnesia, and the fascist forest through Susan Silas and Collier Schorr's Holocaust art

This article examines the tensions between space and violence, amnesia and memorialization, and the uses of the forest by examining the work of two Jewish artists, Susan Silas and Collier Schorr, whose photographs contribute to the work of geographers, historians, landscape architects, literary critics and others concerned with the connection between space and memory. While the beauty of Silas and Schorr's images draws us in and opens up a dialogue between history and experience, these images also uncover the literal and metaphorical violence of these landscapes, resist the impulse toward erasure that the landscape always threatens, and refuse the pollution of the landscape tradition by fascist ideology.