Following her academic research, The Ambiguity of Visual Representations of Trauma, Zhengová now brings to the forefront a visual analysis in the form of a photobook - Catharsis. Concerned with the question: ”how can one represent something visually that is by its very essence unrepresentable without banalizing it, trivializing it, spectacularizing it, and finally repressing it for a second time? 

Catharsis prioritizes a lived experience and explores traumatic memory not from the perspective of moral and medical classifications but instead, as an open artistic inquiry. The images that comprise the series originate from the past but additionally enliven the emotions in the present time.

This project is concerned with the connections between photography and trauma, “between unutterable shock and the most elevated or supreme form of human communication and representation, between traumatic non-experience and aesthetic experience.” 

Mingling somewhere between anxiety and confrontation with reality, the series, may be interpreted as a photographic representation of the common human experience of trauma combined with a narrative that stems from Zhengová’s personal encounter.

L. Zhengová
Self Published
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Year 2021
Pages 100 p.
Dimensions 22 × 31.2 cm.
Signed and numbered
Sewn Bound
Process
Offset Printed
Edition of 200