COLD STONE Europe Ten Years after World War Two Selected photographs from the portfolio PREFACE   Ten Years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, almost everyone I saw in Western Europe had experienced the war. Perpetrators, resistance fighters, victims and collaborators were still alive and functioning in European society. The nearby Iron Curtain that closed Poland, Austria and East Germany to me was still splitting families and peoples.   If you think of your own life ten or twelve years ago, you will realize how well you remember, and how little you have changed in that time. But everyone I saw had to pretend that their war was forgotten.   It was a gray summer, full of falsehood. Only the stones seemed real. They had supported, sheltered and exalted innumerable generations of exploiters, victims, and heroes. I ranged from formerly collaborationist Norway and neutral Sweden and Switzerland through conflicted and victimized France, England, the  Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, through former Axis power Italy to still Fascist Spain, where civil war, not world war two, had left the scars. Everyone seemed damaged.   The rest of Europe was closed off by the Iron Curtain, and the ideological battle and thermonuclear posturing was approaching its height. The Cold War would define the mental climate for another full generation after my visit, rounding out a dark century for Europe. If my pictures appear cool, you will understand that to a student of history, not only was the recent past playing in my mind like the newsreels I had grown up with, but every stack of stones older than a century memorialized still other bad memories and ancient injustices. Although Disneyland was made to look like Europe, Europe was no fairyland.   Still, I could not help looking for beauty.  AFTERWORD   I have looked at photographs all my life. Everybody has.   I have taken photographs for most of my life, but never figured out how to get people to look at them, or for that matter, why they should. They were my personal statements of a way of seeing, a way perhaps of its time, the 1940s and ‘50s.   Two events changed my mind about inviting people to look at my photographs.   One was receiving a gift in1997, John Szarkowski’s 1973 book Looking at Photographs, which he wrote from the cathedral of photographic recognition, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he was curator of photography. It seemed to demand of the viewer a serious consideration of, not photography, but a photograph. I thought, how nice, someone who says the viewer should take interest in how I see. The other event occurred while I listened to some chamber music I have had in my library for years. This one evening, I heard it as I never had before, because of some change in the quality of my attention that evening. And it occurred to me that music and photographs are alike in that they surround us constantly. Then one day we hear or see something more intensely, and it is never the same again. The rare moment when a piece of art breaks through the veil of commonness is what the artist counts on, the moment when we hear or see more actively. We carry that appreciation with us for a long time, and hope it happens again. So I began to revisit my negatives and slides and seek ways to present them. Not all will connect; different ones will speak to different people, some perhaps to no one. I do not exalt them. They are not essays, just mentions. (The viewer does the writing.) But if I can ask a serious viewing of a range of my photographs, some may find a home where they are as satisfying as they were to me. As I see it, if a photograph sets you noticing, it may or may not be a work of art, but it has done the work of art.