Creative Shortlist

This project is a memorial to 544 psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis in 1941 in Latvia; there is one figurative cyanotype image for each person killed. The photographer’s grandmother worked at the hospital from where the patients were taken, and she visited it, finding that although the story is known, no memorial exists. The only official record seems to be a short paragraph in the Nuremberg report, and so far, the photographer has found no record of the patients’ names. The 544 is primarily intended as a memorial to remember the lives lived before these people entered the hospital; before they died. Not knowing anything about their identities, the photographer explains she has ‘tried to imagine each as a unique, precious being, and provide a little of the character stripped from them when they were reduced to a number on a list of nameless victims.’ The prints were made using original photographs posed by models.