On Kalashnikovs, Crosses and Doves

“For a couple of years now, I've been working on separate long-term projects in which I'm confronted to varying degrees with the aftermaths of genocides: I’ve been photographing the sometimes very subtle traces the genocide has left behind in Bosnia, Turkey and Armenia.

While in the case of war you have the front line, weapons, fighting, and refugees, in the case of a genocide you have, as intended by the perpetrators, an eerie silence.

But silence is the mother of metaphors and doves are obviously one of them, charged with meanings of peace. The problem is that there are hundreds of good, and sometimes even iconic, images of doves, so you need to get a bloody good shot of them to avoid boredom and clichés (if that’s at all possible). But, as with crosses and Kalashnikovs, they are very visual and, therefore, very hard to avoid. So photographers, defying the archives in their heads and the rules of artistic growth, find themselves quite often using this visual and cheap short cut to peace. So did I.”