Edgar Allen Beem – Tanja Hollander: Art As an Act of Empathy

Tanja Hollander is a photographer best known for her Are You Really My Friend? project in which she photographed all 430 of her Facebook “friends.” Neither pure portraits nor straight documentary photographs, Hollander’s Facebook pictures are conceptual images that explore ideas about human relations in the age of social media.

Hollander’s latest project began in November 2015, while she was in Paris, France, photographing Facebook friends. Hollander was in Paris when terrorists attacked cafes, a nightclub, and a soccer stadium killing 130 people and wounding 400 more. The terrorist attacks followed one in January 2015 during which Islamist militants murdered eleven people in the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Drawn to the spontaneous memorials that cropped up around Paris, Hollander began photographing this outpouring of collective grief.

On 25 October 2023, murderous violence struck in Hollander’s own community when a deranged man opened fire in a Lewiston bar and in a local bowling alley killing eighteen and wounding thirteen others. In response to the worst mass shooting in Maine history, Hollander, who lives in Auburn, began seeking out and photographing the spontaneous memorials that popped up all over the Twin Cities.

Mourning Flowers, an ongoing project, focuses on the floral bouquets left at memorials. Hollander photographs each bouquet individually but has assembled eighteen of them in a masterwork entitled 18 Bouquets of Flowers for Each October 25, 2023 Shooting Victim in Lewiston, Maine. The flower grid is currently on view at the Maine Museum of Innovation, Learning and Labor (MILL) in Lewiston’s Bates Mill Complex.

One gallery of the Maine MILL is also devoted through 6 September of this year to 261 Flower Sleeves, an installation of hanging plastic flower sleeves Hollander created along with Miia Zellner, an artist and educator who is also part of the deaf community that was victimized by the Lewiston shootings. There is a haunting element of souls rising about 261 Flower Sleeves.

Hollander considers Mourning Flowers an extension of her Ephemera Project, a visual inventory that began with ephemera collected during her Are You Really My Friend? travels. She has since invited people to send her small objects that are meaningful to them and has photographed objects from the Boston Public Library Special Collection of Boston Marathon bombing ephemera and objects from the spontaneous memorials to the Lewiston shootings, much of which is archived at the Maine MILL. The Lewiston ephemera can be seen on the artist’s website.

Rachel Ferrante, executive director of the Maine MILL, says Hollander’s work “invites reflection on the intersection of personal experience and collective responsibility, a theme that aligns with Maine’s values of community and shared humanity, while also highlighting the urgent need for dialogue and action around mass violence.”

Currently, Hollander is “expanding the spontaneous memorial work with flowers and their sleeves in Lewiston to a global scale . . . researching other sites and the respective community responses . . . also, finding places that have either permanent memorials, museums, and/or public archives of mass violence.”

Hollander participates in a working group consisting of people working to document and preserve materials from such terrible tragedies as 9/11, Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon bombing, and the Parkland shootings.

Hollander says she wants her art in response to trauma and violence to be “quiet.” There are no guns, blood, and mayhem in her work.

“Since Paris, my last two bodies of work, Are You Really My Friend? and The Ephemera Project, were about community building, friendship, belonging, memory, self-reflection, and vulnerability,” she says. “This set my direction, and I got to work. I knew I wanted to make a piece about mass violence that wasn’t about the violence.”

Easy access to guns is a major contributor to the epidemic of gun violence in America, as is mental illness. The Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston explored the failures of elected officials, the military, and law enforcement to keep Maine people safe from a known threat, but Hollander’s art is not investigative nor political in nature.

“The work is guided by the terrible fact that 40,000–50,000 people die from gun violence every year in the United States, and events of mass violence and environmental violence that traumatize our communities throughout the world,” Hollander says. “The ripple effect of trauma from one event moves from the inner circle of victim families, friends, and survivors to the community in which they occur, to the state, to the country, and to the world.” Hollander is not, however, looking to express outrage or dictate public policy but “to bring people back to the feeling of losing the safety of their community.”

“This is not art as a call to action,” she says. “It is a call to contemplation.”

Denise Markonish, chief curator of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, organized a major exhibition of Hollander’s Are You Really My Friend? project at MASS MoCA in 2017. “Tanja is an artist who always works with deep empathy,” says Markonish. “While most photographers are seen as passive viewers, she is an active participant—talking to people, hearing what they say, offering solace and visibility. When the tragic shootings happened in Maine she was out on the streets making sure her community was safe and capturing the memorials by the grieving that popped up. In true Tanja fashion, that wasn’t enough; she dove deep into that community and now gives them a place of remembrance with her haunting Mourning Flowers installation.”

Community and empathy, whether online or actual, are the subtexts of almost all of Tanja Hollander’s art. One thing that bothers her about the art of trauma and tragedy is that more artists aren’t involved.

“I’m really surprised at the lack of response to mass violence in general,” Hollander says. “There aren’t a lot of artists making art about it. There isn’t a cultural movement like there is on AIDS. My question is, if you don’t have artists responding to great cultural phenomena, how are you going to remember it?”