All images are from 45 by Damian Heinisch, MACK 2020.

Damian Heinisch has won the MACK First Book Award for his photographic journey from Ukraine to Oslo. The book, titled 45, records Heinisch journey through Europe, a trip inspired by train journeys taken by his grandfather in 1945 and his father in 1978.

As he writes, he drew on his grandfather’s dramatic train journey in the depths of winter 1945 from Gliwice [Poland] to a labour camp in Debalzewo, Ukraine: “While his travels ended in death, my father and his family rode the train to freedom in 1978 from Gliwice to West Germany. Like my father and grandfather before me, I too embarked on my voyage at the age of 45.”

While working on this long-term project - focused on his family's history in the context of the Second World War - it became inevitable for him that he would visit the site of his grandfather's unknown grave in Ukraine, saying: “After my return from Ukraine in 2013, the material disappeared into my archive. When the time allowed, I looked over it again. Seeing great potential for it to become a book, I set out on an unexpected experiment. I realised that my family's lives had been considerably influenced by forced immigration and that, as a method of transportation, trains had played a significant role in the process of resettlement. It therefore made sense to take the train to all these places to which they’d travelled – Ukraine, Germany, Poland and Norway – and to document this journey. The train window became the stage. In each of these countries, I used different photographic approaches and techniques, inspired by historical events.”

Heinisch travelled in Ukraine for 13 days, 8 months before the revolution started in Kiev:“I had this worry that my father’s fear of the Soviet presence, which he experienced in his childhood and in the following years, would somehow transfer to me. He’s had this fear his whole life. Still, I decided to go. It was like a calling, and this was the strongest call in the whole project. In my head, Ukraine was a no-man’s land, but I knew it was necessary to visit the place where my grandfather disappeared, almost like a ghost. None of my family members had been there after his death. For a long time, it was impossible to go.”

For a while, Heinisch asked himself what the motivation for the travel to Ukraine was: “At first I thought it was for me and my project as a photographer, but in the end I realised that it was for my grandfather, for my father and for my aunt. It was for all of us. I needed to understand the history of my family, and through that, to understand where I come from. In Debalzewe, the place where his unknown grave is - an authentic and beautiful graveyard - I chose one grave as his symbolic, final resting place. I left some red and white flowers there. And I called my father. When I heard his voice I felt something was changing and closing - in a positive way.”

One approach to a visual solution was to photograph landscapes as evidence of the events he elaborates:”In Oslo, there was still snow outside my flat when I left in May, but it was thirty degrees in Donetsk, Ukraine, with a clear blue sky throughout our stay. It felt like the right opportunity. I was forced to photograph at the time of day when the light is so blue that the pictures became almost boring in the pictorial sense. But people died at this time of the day – they didn't only die when it was raining or foggy or snowing, which is the impression you get from documentaries or films about war. People died in the most beautiful weather.”

In Ukraine, Heinisch decided to document the terrain where his grandfather’s life ended, through photographs and an imaginary diary he left behind: “I searched for places that he might have walked through and where he might have been forced to work. The terrain is marked by heavy industry and manmade mountains. I photographed these mountains, which look sacred in a biblical way. The whole experience was quite surreal.”

The project was first shown as an installation at The Autumn Exhibition in 2018, before you did the book with Michael Mack: a Japanese-fold paperback also including a large-format fold-out poster: 45 is my first book and each step in the production felt very intense. It was close to an experiment with an unknown outcome. I was surprised to find myself intuitively fragmenting my images in order to achieve a higher abstraction associated with surveillance, veiled in a layer of noise. Through this, I hoped to leave the viewer with an existential feeling.”

The edit of the book felt logical on one hand and challenging and time-consuming on the other he says:"Since we’re looking at a journey, and the images were taken in chronological order, it was an obvious choice to apply the same sequence in ordering the book. I was left with around 4,000 35mm colour images, but had limited space. One by one, I carefully investigated the possibilities of the fragmentation, comparing each image to the following contender. Here, I decided intuitively on the basis of visual association and memory, exploring the potential of those images that stick with us throughout our lives.”

45 is part of a long-term project, which will accumulate into four books, collected in a slipcase. As Heinisch says: “This long-term project has occupied my mind for over ten years. The book transformed into something I really couldn’t have expected or hoped for. And now it’s out of my hands and can live a life of its own. For me, its narrative challenges questions of forced immigration, which has influenced the lives of countless families in Europe and the world as a whole, both in the past and the present. Looking beyond our own time, untangling the web of history, allows us to unravel the threads that force us to repeat past mistakes. We need to see things as they were in order to see them as they are.”