My friend Julie Dermansky, a wonderful and powerful artist, is profiled in an article by my friend Julie Salamon. It appears in today's NY Times. For those who don't have access to the paper or membership to its site, I have copied the story below.

An Artist Determined to See the Grimmest of Tourist Sights

By JULIE SALAMON

Julie Dermansky is not a religious woman, but she recognized a portent of biblical proportions when a tornado knocked down the barn that housed her art studio in May last year. If the tornado didn't wholly convince her that something was up, the death of her dog a week later and two subsequent flash floods surely did.

Surveying the wreckage on her property, in Deposit, N.Y., west of the Catskills, she resolved to return to the life of a full-time artist, a life that she felt had been sidetracked for seven years by commercial success, she said. She shut down her business making decorative objects, furniture and garden accessories and put her farmhouse and 45-acre property up for sale.

She had gone through a divorce a year earlier. So there was nothing to hold her back from pursuing a longtime interest in victims of brutality, the kind of brutality, in effect, that made her own troubles seem very small. Using the $140,000 in insurance money she received a few months later for the damage to her home and business, she took off, lugging three cameras, a tripod, a laptop computer and the clothes she could carry in one bag.

Since January, Ms. Dermansky, 39, has traveled the world: Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Los Angeles. She has been photographing memorials to human cruelty for a book tentatively titled "Mankind's Monuments to Barbaric Acts and Other Macabre Vacation Destinations," for eventual publication by Verve Editions, an independent fine arts and illustrated book publisher.

"You can always find a monument to a barbaric act if you look hard enough," Ms. Dermansky said in a recent interview in Manhattan, having flown in to revisit ground zero, which she has periodically photographed since the attacks in 2001.

"That's how I plotted my trip," she said. "I just Googled around."

In her Rwandan travels, she often had to rely on risky forms of transportation: a helicopter, for example, or the back of a moped driven by a stranger who didn't speak English.

Ms. Dermansky told of visiting the Roman Catholic church in Ntarama where 5,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority, were slaughtered in 1994. Inside the church, lined up on plywood shelves, are skulls of many victims. On the floor, in between pews and around the altar, she found ribs, teeth, fragments of clothing, shoes. "That place got to me," she said. "The essence of mankind's inhumanity was present in that building."

Her work is blunt yet strangely poetic, capturing the residue of violence and disruption while conveying a sense of human fragility. She said it was crucial to photograph what she saw, both the imagery and its implications. "It won't be like that in a couple of years," Ms. Dermansky said. "Everything is getting cleaned up, Disneyfied. "

She found that to be the case at Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned by South Africa's old apartheid rulers for 27 years and former political prisoners are now tour guides. "It's a tourist trap," she said. "I found myself having to hunt for any traces of authenticity."

Yet authenticity was not easy to bear when she found it. "In almost all the museums you find hair, bones, skulls, broken glasses, shoes - children's shoes in particular, fragments of clothing," she said.

She corrected herself: "Leave hair out. In Rwanda, you didn't see hair."

Ms. Dermansky's obsession with human suffering may not seem an obvious one for an artist who has won praise for playful public design projects as well as sculptures, metalwork lighting fixtures and gardening tools.

But Laura Kruger, curator at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, which has shown work by Ms. Dermansky, said there was a logical connection. "She is a highly skilled metalsmith," Ms. Kruger said. "The muscle, the sheer bravado that it takes to wield blow torches and steel plates, the heft she has acquired in doing all this, has become a mental state for her."

"She isn't afraid to look at any concept," Ms. Kruger added. "Not in a traditional way but by totally turning it around, looking at it from underneath, from sideways, from any way other people haven't thought to examine the subject."

As Ms. Dermansky traveled, she e-mailed photographs to Rick Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, whom she met a decade ago when he was working for the city's Department of Design and Construction.

Ms. Dermansky had been chosen to create works for a day care center in Queens and another in Brooklyn. Mr. Bell recalls that he was impressed by her decision to incorporate artistic elements into the floor, using bright colors and laser-cutting technology for a motif of frisky sea life, and then repeating the imagery in the fence surrounding the center.

Still, he was taken aback when Ms. Dermansky's photographs began to arrive. "I found it remarkable that a person I had pigeonholed as a particular kind of artist had evolved into someone who is a very deep thinker on these significant issues," he said.

Raised in New Jersey by secular, American-born Jews, Ms. Dermansky knew about the Holocaust at an early age. But the enormity didn't sink in until she was 12. At summer camp, she read a bunkmate's copy of "Night," Elie Wiesel's autobiographical novel about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. "The endless march of death became engrained in my brain," she said. "No matter how much I learn about history, I can't comprehend this cruelty."

After graduating from Tulane University in 1987, where she studied world history, she traveled for a year on a fellowship, studying monumental and architectural sculpture. By her mid-20's, she was selling her paintings, furniture, jewelry, ceramics and collages in a store in Little Italy, and making large metal sculptures for private and corporate customers.

Her current interest quickened when she was traveling with an Austrian filmmaker, Georg Steinbock, who would become her husband and then ex-husband. The couple was heading toward Tuscany but abruptly changed course and ended up driving to Poland, to the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Ms. Dermansky did not realize how deeply affected she would be until she arrived and reacted by vomiting.

In 1999, the couple presented a video and photography exhibition of their impressions at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum. In a review in The New York Times, Roberta Smith criticized the artists' approach to contrasting the horrors of Auschwitz with its latter-day incarnation as a tourist site. But the review gave Ms. Dermansky enough encouragement that she continued to take photos.

After Auschwitz, there were other eerie vacation destinations. A police morgue in Ecuador. The killing fields outside Phnom Penh in Cambodia. To celebrate Valentine's Day in 2002, she said, she took her husband to Tokyo but then insisted that they visit Hiroshima.

Still, it took the wrath of nature, and that healthy insurance payout, for her to devote herself full time to the photographs. Of her decision to sell her property and pursue the life of a traveler, philosopher and artist, she said, "I look at it as cashing in my chips." She is still interested in metalwork, but only for large public projects. In the meantime, she has another plan. Having felt the emotional charge of taking photographs in unpredictable situations, she wants to become a war photographer.

"There's no political message I'm trying to get someone to swallow," she said. "I'm interested in what drives man, with what it means to be human. I want to experience history firsthand."