Six Million Documentary
Copyright 2010 Denise Martin
I have dedicated the last sixteen years of my artistic life to an ongoing creative project entitled, Six Million: a multimedia commemoration in which the simple repetitive gesture of fingerprinting at once recalls the identity cards of workers at Dachau and other concentration camps, documents their lives, recognizes my uncle Joe Hanson’s photographic work at Dachau, and opens into a series of cascading effects, literally and metaphorically, as the fingerprint becomes portrait photography, digital imagery, prose poem, video, and one of what will be, in 2030, the composed artwork. When Six Million is completed, it will be a concrete memorial to those lost in the Holocaust that will include 50,000 letter-size sheets of 65 lb. acid-free paper, each page containing 120 fingerprints arranged on an 8” x 7” grid, 1260 portraits of my fingerprinting forefinger, 850 prose poems, 9027 works of digital artwork, and 850 videos.
The current fingerprint sub-total is 4332600