The More That Is Taken Away is a meditation on mass violence and what it means to inherit such histories. A nine-year solo attempt to come to terms with historical evil, it takes place at a mass-grave-like excavation behind the artist’s home in rural upstate New York. It is an evanescent memorial and a performance, a cycle to catastrophe and back. Begun in late 2011, work at the site largely concluded in 2019.

 This exhibition was curated by Granary Arts in partnership with Americans and the Holocaust: A Traveling Exhibition for Libraries, an educational initiative of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Library Association, hosted by Snow College Karen H. Huntsman Library from September 4 through October 11, 2023. For more information, visit www.snow.edu/library/.

About the Artist

Ben Altman (b. 1953) trained as an artist by studying physics, towing icebergs, and working in commercial photography. A naturalized U.S. citizen of British origin, his work responds to how histories of mass violence live in our lives and imaginations. Altman has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, two New York State Council on the Arts Artist Support Grants, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, a Project Support Grant from the Center for Photographic Art, and Artist in Community grants from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. His work was selected for the Houston Center for Photography’s 2015 Fellowship, the 2015 Critical Mass Top 50, and many others.

 Event is free and open to the public.