all things human subject to categories | Colette-Yasi Naraghi

Hannah Arendt, defending human plurality, writes, “the supreme crime it (the court) was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people.” This serves as the point of departure of “All Things Human Subject to Categories: A Photo Series,” the idea of which is to exhibit sites of genocide on our own bodies as a recognition of human plurality.

I have no intention of offending anyone with this project even though it’s naïve to say so. I have no intention of commodifying the Holocaust (although these prints are for sale to help me afford the completion of this series) nor would I want to simply present trauma in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This project came about as a result of my academic interests and years of studying the history of camps. It also arose from my desire to photographically catalogue sites of genocide as sites of remembrance. I want to understand the tendency toward preserving and reconstructing sites of genocide. It is important to note that these images are not representing trauma but are meant to be representations of memories of trauma; they are not representations of trauma but representation of an imitation of trauma.

Colette-Yasi Naraghi spends most of her days on the University of Washington campus working toward her PhD. In broad academic terms, she studies aesthetic philosophy and hopes to discredit the singular figure of genius. She came to photography at an early age to ease the transition of making a foreign land home. She mainly shoots on analog and is interested in distances, voids, absences, and the perversity of intervals. She is currently working on a photo series that combines her academic interest in human plurality with visual representations of universal trauma and sites of genocide.