For a week, I’ve looked at a photo where a gun is pointed at a board riddled with holes. A woman’s hands are gripping the board from behind. Part of her hair lets me imagine where her face should be but instead all I see is the pattern of the curtain that the woman appears to be both in front and behind of. “Woman, gun, board” is a photograph in Birthe Piontek’s Zero Hour, the translation of Stunde Null, which refers to the moment of Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. It was a point of total collapse from which an entirely new society and start could be built. Piontek’s intervention in the photograph, only partially removing the woman, suggests the slate was never as clean as the story required.
Piontek’s decisions are deliberate and cumulative. The selection of the photograph. The partial removal of the face. The figure made one with the curtain. The hand holding the gun, anonymous, pointed at someone who holds the target between them. Each element is a choice, and together they speak the same symbol-heavy visual language Germany was already fluent in during this period of a new start. The camera made arrangements look inevitable, like this was simply how things were rather than how they had been constructed to appear. Piontek plays on this, making the photograph appear ordinary because what is being questioned is how normalcy gets constructed in the first place.
The board between the gun and the woman is the threshold between what is exposed and what is protected. She is both shielded and framed by it. The gun did not disappear after the war. It moved indoors, into the domestic setting. What the image asks is who was deemed worth protecting after 1945, and on what terms. The answer was built into the reconstruction of Germany itself, into the housing policy, the family structure, the images of normal life that filled the magazines and the archives Piontek works through.
Modern governments do not only rule through punishment and law. They rule by managing life itself, by deciding what a healthy, productive, normal citizen looks like and then organizing institutions around producing that norm. The state does not always need force because the norm enforces itself. People hold it up for each other the way the woman in the photograph holds the board. Michel Foucault called this biopolitics, and postwar Germany was one of its most deliberate demonstrations.
Reevaluating the past is never separate from commenting on the present. Like a documentary made about a past event, the act of looking is always rooted in the time of its creation. What Piontek made in 2025 is not just about 1945. It is about now. It provokes the viewer to stand beside oneself, to step outside the locomotive of self-propulsion long enough to ask where the tracks were laid and by whom.
Piontek’s book treats Stunde Null as a myth worth questioning. History does not reset. It changes its appearance. The woman in the photograph, present and erased at the same time, is not just a postwar German condition. It is a question the image keeps asking. Who controls history? Who becomes the curtain?
“Woman, gun, board” is from Zero Hour by Birthe Piontek. Published by Gnomic Book in 2025.
Link to Birthe Piontek’s website:
https://www.birthepiontek.com/
Link to the book:
https://gnomicbook.com/collections/books/products/zero-hour
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.