The Galerie Sit Down presents a selection of photographs by Antoine Lecharny from his series Sous terre (Underground), in which the photographer explores the hidden layers of reality with a penetrating gaze and a singular sensitivity.
“Beneath the earth, beneath the trees, beneath the flagstones lie ruined synagogues and bone-filled pits. What is visible on the surface replaces what can no longer be seen. A city returned to its banality. The grass is no longer charred and the bullets have disappeared. Here, everything separates me from the depths of this place. Of the thousands of Jewish children, women, and men who were forcibly taken into the hills surrounding the city to be shot and piled on top of the naked bodies of those who had gone before them, almost no trace remains. No monument, no repentance. Only an engraved stone standing in the middle of brambles, hidden from view, has escaped obliteration.”
Between 2021 and 2024, Antoine Lecharny. conducted a photographic project dedicated to the memory of the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. In the absence of any significant visible traces of these massacres, he photographed landscapes that had returned to a state of relative banality that speaks of the palpable fading of history from the collective memory that is under way.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER ANTOINE LECHARNY FOLLOWING THE TRACES OF THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS.
“From Ukraine to the Baltic countries, via Belarus and Poland, two million Soviet Jews were executed between 1941 and 1944 by special units of the Nazi army and their accomplices.”
[…]
“Even the memory of their disappearance has been denied. The sites of the massacres are silent, and the living go about their daily business, unaware of the dead and the mass graves beneath the everyday landscape. In the town of Buchach, in Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine, ten thousand Jews were shot or deported by the German occupier with the help of its Ukrainian nationalist allies between 1941 and 1944. Nothing remains of this crime not even a monument, a memorial stone, or a plaque.”
[…]
“Anyone who searches carefully may eventually find an engraved stone standing among the brambles. The hill where thousands of people were taken, gathered, shot, and thrown underground is now just an ordinary wasteland. Neither the ghetto nor the street corners where residents were summarily executed are remembered. The contemporary city wants to know nothing. The French photographer Antoine Lecharny, born in 1995, has photographed this oblivion.”
[…]
“Since reading Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz by historian Omer Bartov (Plein Jour, 2021) in 2021, Antoine Lecharny has been searching for traces of the crime, questioning their absence in Ukraine, but also in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. He stayed in Buchach in January 2022, a few weeks before the first Russian bombings, just as the troubled memory of an old war was about to give way to the experience of a new conflict. There he found ruined synagogues, a cemetery with abandoned tombs predating the genocide, stranded on a land without descendants. In his photographs, the past resurfaces in the outline of a swastika spray-painted on a wall, or hides beneath Soviet-era apartment blocks, in the depth of an uncertain landscape, behind the fleeting silhouettes of the living on the verge of being thrown into war themselves.”
[excerpts] Allan Kaval, “The Photographer Antoine Lecharny Following the Traces of the Holocaust by Bullets,” Le Monde, 2024.
THE VANISHED TRACES OF JEWS MASSACRED BY THE NAZIS.
“While the choice of black and white evokes the very idea of the Shoah, it gives the winter photographs taken across white, snow-covered expanses in low light another dimension, endowing the forms with a distinctive sense of relief. The coarse-grained quality of the images makes the emotion especially tangible, an emotion that will never fade.”
[excerpt] Pierre Barbancey, “The Vanished Traces of Jews Massacred by the Nazis,” L’Humanité, December 11, 2025.
Sous terre received support from the Île-de-France Region and the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.
Antoine Lecharny : Sous terre
Until April 25, 2026
Galerie Sit Down
4 Rue Sainte-Anastase
75003 Paris, France
https://sitdown.fr/
PUBLICATIONS
Sous terre, Éditions d’une rive à l’autre, 2025
Disegno Astratto, Tonini Editore, 2025
Côté fenêtre, Éditions d’une rive à l’autre, 2023
Ano Meria, auto-édition, 2021 Même pas morts, auto-édition, 2019 EAS, auto-édition, 2019
