Black-and-White Images Resonate With War s Kaleidoscope of Emotions

University of Cincinnati Fine Arts Professor Jane Alden Stevens has spent two years quietly chronicling the thunderclap violence of war.  Her resulting collection of black-and-white images of World War I’s European battlefields, cemeteries and memorials serves as far more than a mere documentary.

Recently published as a book, “

Tears of Stone: World War I Remembered

,” Stevens’ photos are also now on display in the main lobby of the Veterans Administration Medical Center, 3200 Vine Street, through the end of December.  She will discuss her work from

3-4 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 10

, in the hospital’s auditorium.  Stevens will also briefly discuss the book at

7 p.m.

that same day at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 2692 Madison Road.

Stevens of UC's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, explained, “One of the things I wanted to do with this project was to explore the persistence of human memory.  Do we actively remember the losses of wars from well before our time?...And how does the land itself remind us of our violent past?  Do we still care?”

The answer lies in Stevens’ photos – while taken almost 100 years after the war’s opening salvos – which still depict World War I’s immense destruction visible in upended, pock-marked field; shrapnel-gouged trees; abandoned towns never rebuilt and sculptures that record the unhealed grief caused by the “Great War,” arguably the 20th century’s worst self-inflicted wound.

Though there is nothing overtly grisly about any of Stevens’ work, they still pack quite an emotional wallop, perhaps because they seem suspended in time, a gift across the generations.  Chicagoan Ed Warner bid on and walked away with a copy of “Tears of Stone” at the Society for Photographic Education’s national conference earlier this year.  He explained that he first bid on the book because of its general topic – World War I – since he’d traveled along the Western Front.  Later, it was the photographs that gripped him.

He said, “They convey the scars, the emotions of loss, the deep wells of memory that World War I represents still for most Europeans.  School kids in France go on established field trips to Verdun (a World War I battle site that devoured better than one million soldiers) like our kids go to memorials in Washington D.C.  We’re almost to the 100-year point when that war began, and we tend not to think about it much here, but it’s alive for the Germans, French and British.  Absolutely everyone lost a grandfather or an uncle or knew someone who was maimed…If you sink your hand into the soil around Verdun, you’ll come up with a handful of steel.  You don’t have to go deep at all.  It’s literally and figuratively just below the surface.”

Twenty images from “Tears of Stone” are on exhibit at the V.A. Medical Center.  Other images can be seen at www.janealdenstevens.com

Stevens’ work has been supported by grant from UC, the Ohio Arts Council and the English-Speaking Union.