Seeing memories with more than the mind’s eye. Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe
Seeing memories with more than the mind’s eye
Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe February 24, 2017
Rosemarie Zens was born in 1944 in a town in eastern Germany that soon thereafter became part of Poland. She returned with a camera 70 years later. Might that history account for the arresting way in which these pictures feel at once connected to the landscape and apart from it?
Zens is given to lyrical titles. It’s there in the title of the show, “The Sea Remembers,” as well as individual photos (“Ailments of the Full Moon,” “Floating Memories”). She’s given to lyrical images, too, but it’s a lyricism that’s tempered and unillusioned.
The pictures fall into two groups: a dozen, large and in color, are of the outdoors; another 17, small and black-and-white, are mostly of people and interiors. The latter look like snapshots but feel like something more — Zens is very good at intimation. She has a knack for matter-of-fact mystery. It’s perhaps related to her fondness for weather: mist, snow, cold. What’s more mysterious in daily life than meteorology? Somehow Zens manages to make even cold visible. That’s as hard as showing the past in the present — and, when achieved, as transporting.