Pictures of the Day: Syria and Elsewhere

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Photos from Syria, Turkey, Bangladesh and Germany.

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A Reconstruction of Memory

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Johan Willner started out as a documentary photographer, trying to capture decisive moments that explained other people’s experiences. He later became a printer for Magnum in New York, painstakingly reproducing other people’s visions while studying the archived contact sheets of Josef Koudelka, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

But the most vivid images he saw were difficult for him to understand and impossible to reproduce. They were not on paper, but in his head â€" disturbing recollections of his father’s life in a psychiatric ward in Sweden. When Mr. Willner was 11, his father was hospitalized for depression, and he remained institutionalized for most of the rest of his life.

Johan Willner “Runner Boy,” 2011.

There were no family photos of his father in the hospital because no one wanted to remember. But for most of his life, Mr. Willner, 41, had been captivated by the memories. He did not always understand them, and some were upsetting, but in an odd way, their familiarity comforted him.

“It’s a visiting room, and I was studying outside,” he said. “My mother was hugging him and he was not hugging back. He was just standing there. He couldn’t really respond, and I remember that he didn’t respond and I was trying to figure out what was going on inside, but it was also strange. Just that he sort of â€" he didn’t have this spark, even to respond to a hug.”

Decades later, Mr. Willner, now a father himself, decided to engage these mental images â€" to challenge them and try to decipher their meaning. To do so, he felt, he needed to somehow make photographs of them. So, he recreated the scenes.

“Of course it would be another picture,” he said, but by using the visual language of documentary photography, he could make the memories seem quite real. He compared the results to watching a very good movie: “You know the movie is not real, but it feels real and you can relate to what’s going on.”

Mr. Willner took his 4-by-5 camera and enlisted relatives, friends and strangers recruited online to portray characters from his childhood. He painstakingly curated the scenes, controlling every element from costumes to sets, and spent weeks creating each image.

Johan Willner “The Blue Picture II,” 2006.

The result is the book “Boy Stories,” published in Germany by Hatje Cantz in 2012. In the text, Mr. Willner describes one of the earliest memories that he recreated (Slide 17):

In my memory, I see a boy. The boy is seven years old and has just started school. He is excited by the adventure that awaits him. He goes out into the schoolyard unaware that it is divided among the different gangs and peer groups. In front of him, children are standing around a car; something has happened and an adult is also there. Some of the children laugh and joke. Others are quieter, more withdrawn. The boy pushes his way forward to get a better look. Then he sees his friend sitting in the car; he is bleeding from his head, clenches his teeth and turns his gaze on the boy. The boy admires his friend for not crying. He is just sitting there, being stared at, mocked. But he doesn’t lose face.

Recreating these scenes forced Mr. Willner to confront them and to come to terms with a childhood consumed with trying to fit in and, after his father’s hospitalization, to remain in control. Because of his father’s illness, Mr. Willner had to “switch places” with him and, he said, “become a man” at an early age.

“I tried to figure out how I was supposed to grow up as a boy and be a man, and that has been following me from then until today,” he said. “I think I’m trying to be strong. But suddenly when you have children, you realize that it’s okay to be fragile.”

Johan Willner “Maze,” 2006.

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