Ori Gersht. White Noise. 1999-00. Photographs.

The series of photographs that compose White Noise use long exposure to trace out a train ride between Auschwitz and Belzec. The open shutter witnesses from the passing landscape a dense mesh of leaves and branches, recorded as over-exposed, motion-blurred vignettes, or as Gersht describes them, “fleeting moments.” The camera’s inability to create indexical certainty from its long exposures gestures at the impossibility of making sense of the great human tragedy carried out along these tracks decades before, as these same landscapes that the camera grasps at would have witnessed the forced passage of millions of Jews and other marginalized populations to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.