The long panoramic images in Evaders were photographed in the
Pyrenees along the Lister Route, on the border between France
and Spain. This route is symbolic as a place of transition,
suspended between past and future. It has a long history of
smuggling, economically motivated migration and the search for
refuge from political or religious persecution. During World
War II many used this route to escape Nazi occupied France.
One of these was the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin,
who committed suicide after he found the border closed on the
day he attempted to cross it in September 1940. Benjamin’s
failed escape has become tagged with a prophetic forecast of
the impending cataclysm in Europe. The clear visual references
to German Romanticism in Gersht’s photographs, particularly
to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, are suggestive of
a fatal attachment to German culture that prevented Benjamin,
like many others, from grasping the horrific scope of the Nazi
agenda until it was too late to escape its consequences. Since
the introduction of the Single European Act the physical borders
are no longer there, but Gersht’s work raises questions
about the continued existence of cultural and psychological
borders.
