After a lone trip to Chernobyl in 2005, Donald Weber returned to the abandoned site of the nuclear disaster and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine photographing the ruins of the unstoppable storm we call history. Traveling and living with ordinary people who had endured much, and survived everything. Weber began to see the modern state as a primitive and bloody sacrifical rite of unnamed power.
INTERROGATIONS is the result of his personal quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the bloody 20th century. In dialogue with writer Larry Frolick - whose own ancestors had been decimated in the final months of WW II - Weber insistently and provocatively addresses his questions both to the living survivors and to the ghosts of the State's innumerable victims, resurrecting their final hours by taking their point of view, and performing a kind of incantatory meditation over their private encounters with power.
The policeman, working girls, thugs, dissidents and hustlers who inhabit these pages are all orphans of a secret history; the outline of our collective fate takes shape in Weber's epic work, expanding our awareness of what it means to be an actor in today's dark opera.
About the Author: Donald Weber originally worked as an architect in Rotterdam with urban theorist Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He freelanced for many publications in Canada and abroad before devoting his artistic career to an epic study of how Power deploys an all-encompassing theatre, implicating everyone in its secret collaboration with both masters and victims.
His projects include 'The Underclass and Its Bosses: Crime & Punishment Ukraine', which won the Lange-Taylor Documentary Prize; 'Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl', which won the Photolucida Book Award; 'The Drunken Bride, Russia Unveiled', which won a Guggenheim Fellowship; 'Cities Under Siege', which won a Canada Council Fellowship. He is represented by the photo agency VII Network.
Larry Frolick is a regular contributor to the literary quarterly, Descant, Larry travels yearly to Asia, the Middle East, and the Artic from his family home in Niagra on the Lake, Ontario, Canada. An award winning author and social critic with a special interest in post-modern global culture. His published works include four non-fiction books and scores of journal essays and magazine articles based on deep field research, on diverse subjects. Among his numerous awards are four National Magazine Awards (Canada); the 2006 Alexander Ross Award for Canada's Best New Magazine Journalist; and the 2006 Lange-Taylor Prize (USA) for a long-term collaboration with Weber on a documentary project, 'The Human is an Atom that Won't Be Split', about the post-Soviet experience of Ukraine's underclass.
Larry is currently completing three new books, including 'Melt Down', another documentary collaboration with photographer Don Weber on life with nuclear decay in four international societies.
