Julian Harrison Consultant

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about

After working in academia and then in rugby league development and promotion, I have spent the last twenty years of my life working in community engagement, development and in the specific areas of equality, diversity, community cohesion and human rights. Indeed, I am  recognised and respected for this work both in Leicestershire and wider afield. Originally trained as a musician – I gained a music scholarship to Gordonstoun and then studied music at the University of Durham – I went on to pursue other interests gaining further qualifications from the Universities of Leicester and Leeds. However, my ongoing passion for social justice and history resulted in an immersion in exploring themes related to the Holocaust. During the course of the last fifteen years or so I have spent many weeks visiting Holocaust related sites in Germany, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, France and Poland, undertaking research and taking photographs. I established Holocaust Memorial Day observance at my place of work, producing annual exhibitions and lectures based on my own research material. My identity as a passionate campaigner for human rights also stems from my own mental illness (I have clinical depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Anxiety Disorder) and the life of my brother, Danny, who had Down Syndrome and who sadly passed away in 1996. I am also autistic. I devote a lot of my time to encouraging a greater awareness and understanding of mental ill health and autism, offering advice and guidance to those directly affected and addressing the stigma and discrimination that still seems to accompany both mental illness and neurodevelopmental conditions. I have spoken in the media, to organisations, students and in public on these matters and do lots of work from a lived experience perspective in universities, for mental health organisations and others. I live in Wigston Harcourt, on the edge of the city of Leicester. I am married (to Lesley) and have four children – Leomi, Luke, Joel and Ellory – and two grandchildren, Lily and Lenny
‘Shoah Images’

‘Shoah Images’

I invite you to visit my website telling the story of the Holocaust through contemporary images.

The inspiration behind ‘Shoah: Contemporary Images of the Holocaust’ was personal recollections and visits to Jewish and Holocaust sites in Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, France, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland over the course of many years. Together these images of here and now tell the story of  what happened in the Shoah. (Julian Harrison, November 2020)

During these visits, an attempt was made to go behind the surface and to record, verbally and visually, relatively unknown material to co-exist alongside established information. This meant that sites of Jewish life prior to the advent of the Nazi genocide as well as places that have been elevated in significance as a result of it, became very much the preserve of attention and focus. Former synagogues, community centres, streets and homes as well as old cemeteries and even sports stadia were photographed alongside the remains of Nazi persecution – ghettoes, camps, railway tracks, deportation sites as well as Gestapo and SS buildings and even the homes used by prominent officers during their sojourn of officialdom and reign of terror. The purpose was not to reveal everything, to go everywhere or to chronicle every episode. It was rather to offer snapshots of a story that has always been much more than a brief twelve-year nightmare (the period of Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945). It was to encapsulate things before and afterwards, to highlight the mundane as well as the known, the routine as well as the exceptional, the perennial as well as the specific.

From Amsterdam to Lublin, from Terezín to Auschwitz, from Berlin to Warsaw, from Dachau to Majdanek, from Łódź to Sobibór, from Paris to Paneriai, the lens of my camera sought to capture and epitomise, to record as well as to influence. What you see is not necessarily familiar or indeed famous but suggestive and no less important. They are my own choice from thousands of images, a choice conditioned not just by the need to tell a story but also by the opportunism of finding the right photograph at the right time.

The use only of contemporary images is deliberate. To demonstrate the present reality of a story that should never be confined to the past.

These images will appeal to Holocaust historian, interested observer and social commentator alike. Together they comprise immersion into a journey that took life away but which also seeks to reaffirm its soul and its significance.

To view the website, please click here.