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  © Jason Lazarus: „Too Hard To Keep“, since 2010

Jason Lazarus (* 1975) lives and works as an artist, university teacher, curator and writer in Florida, USA. He introduced his long-term project, “Too Hard to Keep” in 2010. Lazarus completed his studies in photography at Columbia College Chicago in 2003; starting out from the medium of photography, he now often performs installations that seek new ways of engaging the photographic and bearing witness.

 

http://jasonlazarus.com

 

Interview with Jason Lazarus

 

The topic of the festival is “Innere Sicherheit - The State I Am In” – which includes political aspects of “Homeland Security”, but also very personal, private aspects. How do you relate to these issues?

“Innere Sicherheit” is a very productive phrase to consider. This idea that each one of us is a host or a multitude for the countless realms we are a part of, now including digital spaces and networks, feels very current. My work for the festival, THTK (2010-Present), features images and image-objects that have been submitted to an archive organized around the invitation “do you have photos or photo-objects too hard to keep but too painful to destroy?”

How do you understand your work in the context of “Innere Sicherheit”?

The collection is an ongoing, liminal space I created because I wanted it as a person and an artist. I want a space where I am reminded that I live in a larger community of changing images that I may learn from, and to create a public conversation around that, and for the conversation to not offer catharsis (relief), but an ongoing meditation on images, memory, time, and meaning.

As I embark on my 13th year of working with images, I appreciate more and more the idea that it is we who are images, and I want to continue forward with this idea critically, philosophically, and with empathy...