821377

821377 is a photographic project by Alfred Schupler about family memory, deportation, and inherited trauma. Through images made in Ukraine, it links a private history of loss to present violence and asks how photography can transmit memory.

Memory, Deportation, and Transmission

821377 is a photographic project by Alfred Schupler about family memory, deportation, and inherited trauma. The work begins with the story of the artist’s grandfather, Johann Schupler, deported to the Soviet Union, where his identity was reduced to the prisoner number 821377. Reclaimed as the title of the project, this number becomes the trace of a personal history embedded in a wider history of violence.

Photographs made in Ukraine, in territories marked by war, do not illustrate the family story directly; instead, they create a resonance between inherited memory and present conflict. Published in a signed and numbered edition of 20 copies, 19 of which have been donated to photography museums, libraries, and institutions, the book is not for sale and is conceived as an act of remembrance and transmission rather than a commercial object.