MASTERPIECE HIGHLIGHTS: Stand 611, The Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London

Throughout Gersht’s career, his work has been concerned with the relationships between history, memory and landscape. He often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories.

Gersht approaches this challenge not simply through his choice of imagery, but by using modern technology and artificial intelligence to push the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth. Frequently referencing art history, Gersht’s imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty and violence. This has included an exploration of his own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, a series of post-conflict landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow-motion films in which traditional still lives explode on screen.

For the series Evertime, Gersht commissioned masterfully crafted replicas of the vessels and bottles found in Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. After carefully arranging and lighting them, he shot the delicate ceramics with an air rifle while simultaneously recording the destruction and fragmentation of the objects with a high-resolution camera. Sequences of images and panoramas relay a cinematic unfolding of destruction and collapse, not otherwise visible in our usual experience of events.

By selecting a single image from each event, which contains, within itself, an infinite number of possibilities, Gersht is attempting to mimic the nature of historical memory, where single moments are isolated and awarded with iconic status, whilst the rest go unnoticed and are consequently forgotten in the ocean of the passing time.

This extraordinary photograph was taken on the East Ridge of the Doldenhorn in the Bernese Oberland of the Swiss Alps (about 12 miles SW of the Jungfrau). Bradford Washburn made this photograph on July 24th 1960 at 10.40am, out of a Super Club 150 airplane on ski wheels, flying out of the little airport at Belp, near Berne, Switzerland. He used a Fairchild K-6 aerial camera,  just after several days of heavy fresh snowfall through which the climbers were wallowing. If you look carefully you will see the footsteps of two other parties which climbed this ridge before the storm, still clearly visible behind this group of climbers.

Bradford Washburn (born June 7, 1910 in Cambridge USA), was an American, internationally renowned photographer, cartographer, and expert on Alaska's mountains and glaciers. He was Director of Boston's Museum of Science for over 40 years and served as Honoury Director until his death in January 2007. A pioneer of arial photography, his images of mountains are majestic, serene and sublime and his photographic work spans over six decades.