Interrogations

Book excerpt: 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.