In 2004, at the age of 29, Portland-based photographer Lauren Henkin learned she had a growth in her abdomen. The tumor was benign, and though the doctor recommended surgery to remove it, Henkin resisted. By 2009, a different growth had taken over one of her ovaries, and she had to undergo surgery to remove the ovary. Still, she elected not to have doctors remove the original mass, which she describes as having become, strangely, an adopted part of her body. It took another year of increasing discomfort and illness for her to elect to have the mass removed.

In despair, she found inspiration, turning to her surroundings to make sense of what was going on inside her:

Sometime before the first surgery, I began photographing urban landscapes—trees, weeds, shrubs and other vegetation attempting to grow in unlikely places. At times invasive, at times reclaiming, at times succumbing, it was hard to know whether to champion these subjects or hone my garden shears. There is a fine line between what is deemed invasive and what is merely reclaiming a rightful environment. Who am I to judge, even when the domain is my own body? I never connected these urban growths to the ones in me. I was drawn to them because they persevere. They are survivors. Emerging through asphalt, suffocated by electrical wires, trapped between buildings, standing proud even in defeat, they are both accommodating and unyielding. I respect them.

Her images, profound and disturbing, feature trees growing out of dumpsters and brilliantly green vegetation clinging to massive concrete bridge supports. What better time than Tu B’Shevat, which honors nature and life and growth, to reflect on survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s what nature is all about.

Lauren Henkin
Related: Green Day [Tablet Magazine]

Born in Brooklyn and raised in rural Connecticut until the age of 10, when his family moved to Los Angeles, Shulman maintained his connection to nature while simultaneously documenting a new urban paradigm that was taking shape on the West Coast. Shulman sought spiritual sanctity in the beauty of the physical world—both built and natural—but never in a synagogue. He had no interest in ethno-centrism or Jewish exceptionalism. Yet he maintained close relationships with architects in the progressive modern movement, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe who often found philosophical and professional support from Jewish Americans.

Architects of American synagogues embraced the seismic shift of modernism, and so too did practitioners and patrons of residential and commercial modern design. This generally meant rejecting historical precedent in favor of a forward-thinking visual and spatial vocabulary that valued clean lines and new technologies over fussy ornamentation. When it came time to design a home and studio for himself on a bucolic Hollywood hillside, where Shulman bought a plot in 1947, he hired his friend Raphael Soriano, a Sephardic Jew who immigrated from Rhodes, Greece, to Los Angeles. The project was completed in 1950, and Shulman lived and worked at the property until his death at home on July 15, 2009, at the age of 98.

Although Shulman traveled with his camera and took photographs abroad, two recent books about him reveal new insights into his relationship with his adopted hometown. This spring’s Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis—which features text by architectural writer Sam Lubell and a forward by Shulman’s daughter Judy McKee—shows how Shulman recorded all corners of L.A. as it went through various boom cycles and forged a new path for cities in the West. Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles draws from a 2007-2008 exhibition of Shulman’s work at Los Angeles Central Library that featured a range of buildings and environments. And Shulman’s legacy is again manifest in several exhibitions associated with the Getty-coordinated citywide series of exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, which continues through April 2012.

For the accompanying slideshow, author Lubell selected images representative of Shulman’s life and work. His commentary is provided in the captions.

Arbus giggled. Her voice was loud and clear yet sweet and spontaneous. She talked fast, following her mind’s rapid turns and twists, and suddenly stalled, in awe of her characters. “Oh, and that’s just a family in Brooklyn,” she said. Pointing to the Ideal Marriage book on the shelf to the husband’s right in the photo, she added, “You could tell it didn’t work very well.” More giggles. A few minutes later she recounted her experience of walking around naked at a nudist camp. “I wish I could slip into something comfortable,” she said she’d thought. Her audience roared in the background. Arbus comes across as naïve yet aware of her photographs’ tragic dimensions, their blind spots and their absurdity.

Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age of 48, photographed people in society’s margins. She was always on the lookout, excavating hidden narratives in unusual places: at nudist camps and diaper derbies, in circuses, freak shows, and mental institutions. Arbus was an adventurer. She wanted to go where no one else went, and her camera gave her the license to do so. Marvin Israel, her close friend and an artist, said her photographs were only trophies.

Two new books attempt to portray Arbus’ life. Diane Arbus: A Chronology was co-authored by Arbus’ older daughter, Doon, and Elisabeth Sussman, a photography curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The charming paperback edition features a selection of correspondence and excerpts from personal notebooks as well as two childhood “autobiographies” (first published as part of the catalog to the traveling Arbus retrospective “Revelations,” which was on view from 2003 to 2006). A Chronology also contains 55 biographies of Arbus’ family members, friends, and colleagues, from Marvin Israel and Lisette Model to August Sander and Richard Avedon.

“This is the closest thing you can find to a Diane Arbus autobiography,” Lesley Martin, Aperture’s publisher, said recently at an event introducing the volume at the School of Visual Arts. The book’s eclectic assemblage, its circumspect selection of material, and its simple and elegant design pay tribute to a complex woman. But Arbus was much more than one could fit onto 192 pages: She was funny, intelligent, tragic, anxious, knowledgeable, naïve, adventurous, self-conscious, frivolous, independent, and depressed. She was aware of the larger artistic context she worked within, understood irony and metaphor, and knew that her public exposure of marginalized people was, in her own words, “two-faced.”

Arbus came from a wealthy Jewish family and grew up sheltered from the ravages of the Great Depression. She craved adversity and was drawn to differences and oppositions. Her work is voyeuristic and morally complex. As an artist she interacted with her subjects: They posed for her, and she posed for them. (In fact, her subjects seem to remember almost as many stories about her as she did about them.) Her sitters look directly at her camera, and we are forced to confront their gaze. For Arbus, getting to know “the other” was a learning experience greater than getting to know herself. “Knowing yourself is not going to teach you anything,” she once said. “It’ll leave you with a kind of blank.”

Arbus’ daughter Doon, who manages her mother’s estate, wrote that she chose to release the autobiographical material hoping it would “render the scrim of words invisible so that anyone encountering the photographs could meet them in the eloquence of their silence.” But words and images invite discourse, leading to William Todd Schultz’s recent psychobiography: An Emergency in Slow Motion—The Inner Life of Diane Arbus.

This book “superimposes” the artist’s real and alleged psychological conflicts onto her work. Schultz argues that Arbus’ obsession with secrets calls for a psychological approach because the pictures are her “internal world externalized.”

Right off the bat he sounds mad at the Arbus estate, which he calls “famously closefisted, notoriously obstreperous if not outright adversarial.” Clearly he didn’t get the access to Arbus’ material he had hoped for. His original material is sparse; most of his footnotes refer to Patricia Bosworth’s awkward 1984 biography, Diane Arbus, and to the estate’s Revelations, in which Arbus’ chronology originally appeared.

Given Doon Arbus’ wish for privacy and respect, and the amount of care with which she selected the material for A Chronology, Schultz’s psychobiography feels ham-fisted. To him, Arbus’ art is little more than a symptom of her pathological disorders. Schultz alleges that Arbus’ parents’ rejected her and that she had incestuous relations with her brother Howard. Arbus was subjected to negative emotions and developed an “insecure/anxious attachment style.” Schultz believes that “her shots mimicked her own interior” and that her “queer, perverse pictures of freaks signified a queer, perverse household.” Arbus was forced to isolate the good from the bad to keep negative emotions at bay. Schultz attributes her common themes of “splitting” and “integration”—in her pictures of twins and triplets, for example—to her psychological malaise. He describes how Arbus clung to her subjects (and to her therapist) to defend herself from separation and loss. These unequal relationships, says Schultz, allowed Arbus “to exert some control over her fraught emotional experience, always tenuously managed at best.” Her sitters were a projection of her own inner torment, her work a “private version of exposure therapy.”

This exposure therapy stopped working when Arbus began “Untitled,” her photo series of the mentally retarded, which she produced from 1966 to 1971. These were people beyond manipulation, Schultz writes, who did not absorb Arbus’ negativities as well as her previous subjects had. “Arbus was left with a lonely, empty feeling. She was thrown back on the one thing that remained—herself.”

Arbus’ work was not “restitutive” and didn’t allow her to work through the trauma, Schultz writes. “Does her work prove her madness?” he asks mysteriously. “Did her work hasten her demise?” In other words, did photographing masked, retarded people drive Arbus to commit suicide?

I found Schultz’s poetic language seductive, but I got lost in the tangents that crisscross the book’s 256 pages like spider webs. Schultz’s sign-pointing—“Later I explore in detail,” “It’s a scene I return to later”—does not stop the book from being disorienting.

With one exception, An Emergency contains little original reporting: Schultz, who teaches psychology at Pacific University in Oregon, prides himself on having gained access to Helen Boigon, the therapist who treated Arbus in the years preceding her suicide. Boigon, who died a few years ago, revealed information that was never supposed to leave the treatment room, a troubling ethical violation, as the patient’s right to confidentiality continues after death.

Ethics aside, most of Boigon’s information is vacuous: Arbus never talked about her family; she never discussed her art in therapy; she was searching for “experience” and, in Boigon’s recollection, “feeling bad.” Schultz stretches out the little he got from Boigon to ridiculous lengths; he even somehow manages to discuss Boigon donating her husband’s organs to the hospital in which he died. Schultz did uncover one juicy detail: According to Boigon, Arbus came on to her during therapy, “with a somewhat slimy expression on her face.”

To speculate that Diane Arbus killed herself because retarded people couldn’t respond to her like her other subjects did is preposterous. Most people who commit suicide do so because they are depressed and their judgment is impaired. Arbus had suffered from bouts of depression for years. “And it is so goddamn chemical, I’m convinced,” she wrote in a letter to her friend Carlotta Marshall in 1968, three years before she killed herself. “Energy, some special kind of energy just leaks out and I am left lacking the confidence even to cross the street.”

An artist is not simply a puppet of her emotional state. One does not just click the shutter button (or pick up a pen) and deliver a portrait of one’s soul. Arbus did have an emotionally ambivalent childhood. But she also had a first-class education, a familiarity with psychoanalytic theory and Greek myths, and a clear knowledge of historical and contemporary currents in art and literature. Diane Arbus was conscious, selective, and aware of her power over her subjects. She made people pose for her and prodded them. (The grimace of the boy with the hand grenade was a result of her exasperating him, she said in the 1970s slide presentation.) Arbus took an active part in her art and edited her work heavily. She didn’t just capture reality; she created it. Out of a slew of photographs, she carefully selected the one that had all the elements she wanted.

I’m not opposed to stories about artists and writers’ lives. I like them, but Arbus’ art is much greater than a troubled woman’s psyche; it stands powerfully on its own. Her photographs cannot be reduced to a symptom or any real or imagined private pathology. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” she once said. “The more it tells you, the less you know.”

Where steel engravings of the Holy Land had long excited his imagination, Twain’s encounters with the ancient landscape left him at loose ends, unable to reconcile the mythic with the real. “But in the engravings,” he wrote woefully, “there was no desolation; no dirt; no rags; no flies; no ugly features; no sore eyes … no stench of camel.” Given his druthers, the celebrated American writer much preferred the imagined Holy Land to its real-life, fly-specked, odiferous counterpart.

Perhaps Twain might have changed his tune had he had occasion to view the photographic treasure trove of thousands of images, at once reverential and knowing, that was produced by the American Colony Photo Department between the late 19th century and the 1940s, and that now reposes in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. For decades, this commercial photography studio, headquartered in East Jerusalem, fastened its sights on a wondrous mix of the topographical and the typical, on ancient ruins and on the latest political maneuverings. Little escaped its scrutiny.

When not dutifully photographing scenes of camels solemnly trekking across the crest of a landscape that was nothing short of biblical, or hand-coloring images of the Jordan River that were so inviting one yearned to be baptized in its waters, the photographers of the American Colony came up with pictures of the landscape, and its varied inhabitants, that show a visual acuity and formal sophistication so pronounced, so spot-on, that they take one’s breath away.

Its body of work includes scenes of mountains with shapes rendered as pure geometry; doe-eyed Palestinian mothers and their babies; nubile Zionist women in shorts; the lonely outpost of a newly constructed house; confident colonial administrators bearing up under the weight of so many medals on their chest; elderly Yemenite Jews who are burdened by the weight of history—and everywhere the play of light and shadow on the land.

Bringing to bear the most modern of technologies—the camera—on the most ancient of landscapes, the American Colony Photo Department came as close as anyone possibly could to balancing the imagined silhouette of the Holy Land against its actual content.

The landscape also looms large in the stunning body of work created over the past 20 years by Sharon Ya’ari, one of Israel’s leading contemporary photographers, whose layered, nuanced, and achingly beautiful images are poised between promise and thwarted expectation, between history and sociology. More rueful than dutiful, more ironic than reverential, Ya’ari’s photographs zero in on, and take the measure of, the current state of affairs in Israel. But they do so in an entirely unexpected manner.

Although Ya’ari’s oeuvre is clearly influenced by the past—how could it be otherwise in a country where nearly every other dunam, or quarter-acre, is given over to the commemoration of a battle or an historical episode or a memorial?—he hadn’t had the opportunity to immerse himself fully in the historic archives of the American Colony Photo Department until he came to Washington this fall.

Over the past few weeks, while in residence at George Washington University as its very first Schusterman Foundation Visiting Artist from Israel, Ya’ari spent a lot of time in the company of his photographic predecessors. What held his interest were not just the physical appeal and technical prowess of their work. Equally captivating were the ways in which the American Colony photographs provided Ya’ari with a sharply etched visual history of the country in which he grew up, introducing him to places and events and perspectives he knew only from books or conversation.

It’s too early to tell how Ya’ari’s encounter with the American Colony photographs will influence his work, if at all. In the accompanying slideshow Ya’ari reads and interprets the body of work of the American Colony Photo Department in light of his own. Five images, selected by Ya’ari from the Library of Congress archive to reflect his perspective on the collection, were taken by the members of the American Colony Photo Department over a 50-year period between 1898 and 1938. These images placed a premium on the romance and pathos of the Holy Land. The remaining slides were chosen by Ya’ari from among his own recent photographs of the Israeli landscape—chosen because they gently subvert the notion of its timelessness, highlighting instead its dynamic relationship to change.

Often askew, the frames in One to Nothing offer geometric compositions in a palette of the desert: sand, mud, rust, washed-out skies, and Jerusalem stone. Human or animal subjects are often in repose, with their eyes hidden, such that they become as much a part of the sunburned landscape as a cypress, a bougainvillea blossom, a Jewish star on a gate, or a car that has gone over a cliff. But even in their anonymous stasis, the people appear unaccommodated. Rozovsky—who now lives in Russian Brooklyn but grew up on the north shore of Boston after narrowly missing direct emigration to Israel with her Soviet Jewish parents—acknowledges that though her pictures contain humans, they are not portraits. “They’re more actions and gestures,” she told me recently, “human effort abstracted.”

In one, a man climbs a gated fence from one part of an ancient wall to a seemingly identical part. In another, a young couple—embracing, mourning, or reconciling, it’s hard to say—find the space to fully hold each other between parked cars. A camel’s head is tucked such that it’s impossible to know if the animal is coming or going. A family seems to have made its home in a tent on a remote beach across from a turbulent sea, while another couple has found an idyll by pushing a wheelchair to the coastline. A young frum girl, in her jean skirt, stands glumly in thigh-deep water, while a mud-covered woman pushes against the earth as if to nudge it along in space.

In fact, though, there is no such thing as an apolitical view of Israel—the stakes are too high, and the history too deep. A move toward abstraction could be viewed as the cheapest of cop-outs—the artist might be saying, I won’t take sides because, hey, there are no sides to take. Or it could be viewed as an artful transcendence that subtly and not-so-subtly acknowledges and engages the political background to take the specific land and identity struggles of that part of the Middle East and kick them into the universal slog of existence. That distinction is carried in nothing more than the quality of the art. Here, where that abstraction is successful—where these conceptual images could only have been taken in Israel, now—the overall effect is to suggest that in the harsh landscape of the Holy Land, nothing is much, much greater than one.

My first encounter with the real Poland took place a decade ago when I was invited to the Warsaw Book Fair. I remember feeling surprise when I walked out of the airport, a reaction I couldn’t account for at the moment. Later, I realized that I had been surprised that the Warsaw spread before me was alive in Technicolor, that the roads were full of cheap Japanese cars, not horse-drawn carriages, and yes, also that most of the people I saw were utterly clean-shaven.

Over the past decade, I traveled to Poland almost every year. I kept getting invitations to visit and, although I had generally been cutting down on flying, I found it hard to refuse the Poles. Although most of my family had perished under horrendous circumstances there, Poland was also the place where they had lived and thrived for generations, and my attraction to that land and its people was almost mystic. I went looking for the house my mother was born in and found a bank there. I went to another house where she had spent a year of her life and found that it was now a grassy field. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel frustrated or sad, and even took pictures of both sites. True, I would rather have found a house instead of a bank or a field. But a bank, I thought, was better than nothing.

During my last visit to Poland a few weeks ago, for a book festival in another part of the country, a charming photographer named Elzbieta Lempp asked if she could take my picture. I agreed happily. She photographed me in a café where I was waiting for my reading to take place, and when I returned to Israel, I found that she had emailed me a copy of the picture. It was a black-and-white shot of me talking to a tall, mustached man. Behind us, out of focus, was an old building. Everything in the photograph seemed to be taken not from reality, but from my childhood imaginings of Poland. Even the expression on my face looked Polish and frighteningly serious. I stared at the image. If I could have unfrozen my photographed self from his pose, he could have walked right out of the frame and actually found the house where my mother was born. If he were brave enough, he might even have knocked on the door. And who knows who would have opened it for him: the grandmother or grandfather I never knew, maybe even a smiling little girl who had no idea what the cruel future had in store for her. I stared at the picture for quite a while, until my 5-year-old son came into the room and saw me sitting there, eyes glued to the computer screen. “How come that picture has no colors?” he asked. “It’s magic,” I smiled and ruffled his hair.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Dojc, a commercial photographer who has lived in Canada since his family left Slovakia in 1968, returned to visit several towns, including his family’s onetime home, where he learned about the fate of its Jews during the Holocaust, a history his relatives refused to talk about. Dojc’s project shifted with the discovery, during a trip to Slovakia to interview survivors, of abandoned prayer books in long-empty synagogues and schoolhouses that had gone untouched since the Nazis deported Slovakia’s Jews to concentration camps.

The photography exhibit, which opened this week, moves from the hallway of portraits into a light-filled, six-sided room featuring breathtaking images of prayer books in various stages of physical decay and sustaining damage far greater than the wear and tear of everyday use. Katya Krausova, a London-based filmmaker, traveled with Dojc through Slovakia and her documentary plays in the exhibition space.

The layout of the exhibit reflects the genesis of the project and Dojc’s personal journey—the pair discovered a prayer book belonging to Dojc’s grandfather, whom he never met, among the unearthed volumes. The books star in the photographs, commanding attention while revealing layer after layer of abandonment by society and destruction by nature. Yet Dojc believes these books—and all books, for that matter—possess an enchanting, transcending quality. The photographs are about beauty and decay, he explained before the exhibit’s opening: “beauty in decay.”

In the heady days at the end of 2008 and early 2009, the New York Times Magazine hired Kander, an accomplished editorial and fine art photographer, to produce “Obama’s People,” a portfolio of spare, flatly lit individual portraits of 52 members of the president-elect’s transition team. Kander and Times photo director Kathy Ryan called it an “athletic” challenge to corral Obama staffers into shoots in Washington and Chicago as they plowed into executive office at full throttle. All but the most seasoned Washington hands (Clinton, Pelosi, Biden) look rumpled, harried, and disheveled, which is partly Kander’s portraiture style and partly due to the palpable post-election giddiness. Rahm Emanuel, Kander recalls, burst onto the set, shook hands with everyone, said, “Well, this is like my bar mitzvah,” stood for a portrait that accentuates his raccoon-like eye sockets, then barreled out of the hotel conference-room lobby to things that at the time seemed vitally important. “He will be Obama’s chief of staff,” reads the caption to the image showing Emanuel with his suit jacket spread wide as if reaching for holstered six-shooters.

Kander’s images of China along the Yangtze are just as athletic, in their own way: 77 plates shot during five trips in three years from 2005 to 2007. He worked against the current, from the mouth near Shanghai—40 miles wide, the Pacific ocean’s largest pollutant, shuttling 10,000 ships a day—to its source in western Qinghai province, over the Three Gorges. By evidence of what’s on view, Kander slogged through tidal mud, rambled in construction sites, climbed abandoned buildings, trekked to remote frozen banks, and waited under invariably hazy skies for a scene to empty of locals or boats and repopulate in a compositionally sound manner. Despite the apparent difficulty in getting to these vantage points, the mood in the photos is, by Kander’s own admission, contemplative, as if the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu were back composing lyrics to the river and its power to make humans seem puny and vain. “Fluttering from place to place,” wrote Du Fu, “I resemble/ A gull between heaven and earth.”

In modern China, though, where man has worked for millennia to dominate nature, often razing just to rebuild a semblance of what was already there, the power of the 4,100-mile Yangtze to make our aspirations seem small is further heightened in these photographs by the scale of the state’s new infrastructural ambitions. Where Kander confined Obama’s people to a tiny space, the better to humanize their larger-than-life personas, in China, the photographer steps further and further away from the Chinese—leaving them lost and diminished in frames with unbroken horizon lines and towering half-finished constructions: bridges, sea walls, apartment blocks, the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, the flooded Wu Gorge, and the snowy deserts of Qinghai.

Kander left Israel as an infant, following his father, an El Al pilot who, having lost his left eye, found himself forced to reinvent a life in South Africa. There, Kander received a Pentax camera for his bar mitzvah. His required South African national service landed him in an Air Force darkroom, developing and printing aerial pictures for two years in the early 1980s, and many of his landscapes of the Yangtze (and, in previous work, of the Arctic Circle, Los Angeles highway overpasses, the Jordanian desert, the American West, and Chernobyl) still retain a sense of floating or weightlessness.

In these terrifying but aesthetic landscapes, where supertankers can seem like bath toys, Kander finds small scenes of Chinese domestic life, or at least evidence of it having been lived. A man fishes in an inner tube in the pond-like calm of the dammed river, which once would have been so turbulent that elaborate rope tows were the only way upstream. Families gather under huge highway pylons for riverside tea and cards on a hot, lazy Sunday in the megacity Chongqing, chairs and tables set out on what viewers realize is the rubble of demolished housing. Clotheslines, tattooed bathers, solitary construction workers, empty chairs, nappers, and other ghostly remnants of human presence give the vastness scale but provide little comfort.

Kander calls this “simple domesticity pitted against the hugeness of our ideas” an echo of early 19th-century painters Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, whom he cites as sources. The Romantic lesson fits China’s assault on nature, as it does, in a way, Kander’s native Israel, too. In Yangtze, Kander sees “a people scarring their country, and a country scarring its people,” and though nothing in Israel’s public works comes close to the scale of the 1.8 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam—save for the project of statehood itself—Israel retains a similar conundrum of being rooted in a land that seems always a work in progress. This is also, not coincidentally, how Kander, who lives in England, describes himself.

Kander likes to say that his photographs can never be taken again, and he is right. (Rahm Emanuel, for one, has moved on.) But capturing a moment is, after all, the work of photography. As much as time is every photographer’s subject, so must change be its corollary. What Kander is interested in is the agent of change and the self-deception and hubris that fools us into thinking we are masters of it. Anyone or anything—China, Israel, Kander’s boyhood South Africa, Obama—seeking to subdue the forces of man or nature with projects on a super-human scale would do well to first observe the hazy pall over the banks of the Long River. As Kander makes clear, it has seen change you wouldn’t believe.

Indeed, the impossibility of reacting to Holocaust photographs “correctly,” spontaneously, or on the basis of ordinary human intuitions is a key to the most diabolical aspect of the Nazi project. It is a key, that is, to the ways in which the victims were shoved into an indecipherable world where normal human instincts became crimes; where the survival of one was predicated on the deaths of others; where previously unthinkable forms of degradation became common; and where the victims were offered maliciously brutal choices that, if made, would annihilate them spiritually before their physical destruction was complete. The Nazis aimed to destroy the victims prior to their deaths, primarily by eradicating the bonds of self-respect, empathy, and mutual dependence that make civilization possible if not always good.

The Nazi project, in short, was something new, something original, something that “did not conform to any model,” as Primo Levi observed. It had two goals: to create a super-man, and to create a sub-man; as such, it was an assault not only on millions of individual human beings but on the very idea of the human being. What is a normal, natural, or appropriate reaction to this?

Photographs from the Nazi period evoke—though obviously in attenuated form—this demented universe, which is why our typical reactions to suffering are frequently upended when we look at them. To see such images is radically disorienting, for it is often hard to decide which kind of Holocaust image is worse: the ones that reveal the horror, or the ones that hide it. A collection of photographs taken by a Polish Jew named Henryk Ross and posthumously published, in 2004, under the title Lodz Ghetto Album epitomizes this confusion.

Ross was born in 1910. Before the war he had been a sports photographer for a Warsaw newspaper, and after imprisonment in the Lodz Ghetto he was one of two photographers employed by the Department of Statistics; in this capacity he took official photographs for the ghetto’s Nazi administration. Surreptitiously, though, he also took thousands of photos that documented the real face of ghetto life and death. Ross and his wife, Stefania, were among the 5 percent of ghetto inmates who survived the Nazi onslaught; after the war they remained in Lodz and then, in 1950, moved to Israel, where Ross worked as a photographer and zincographer. (He testified at the 1961 Eichmann trial, where some of his photographs were entered into evidence.) He died in 1991.

Ross’ crisp photographs look carefully composed, as if the professional standards he had learned in Warsaw had to be upheld at all costs—even if the subject, now, was the destruction of human beings rather than feats of athletic prowess. In the section of the book the editors have called “Public,” Ross portrays the despair and degradation of the ghetto as it was lived in full view of its inhabitants and its occupiers: the filthy, barefoot people on the streets with their battered tin soup bowls; the unburied corpses strewn on the sidewalks; the public executions; the human mules straining as they lugged heavy wagons of excrement (soon the carriers would die of typhus); the mutilated faces, disfigured by deep and bloody gashes, of those killed in the deportation roundup of September 1942, which targeted the young, the old, and the sick. One especially ugly picture of this event shows Jewish policemen grabbing ill people who, slated for transport to the death camps, were desperately trying to escape through the windows of the ghetto hospital. And everywhere in Ross’ images the yellow stars appear, like crazy little sparks of hatred: We see them sewn onto armbands, and onto coats front and back, and hanging on pendants around children’s necks. (Did the Nazis worry that these children would forget they were Jewish?) Even the scarecrow guarding a scrawny plot of ghetto land wears one.

But it is another set of Ross’ photographs, called “Private” and previously unpublished, that cause the biggest shock, though at first one eagerly welcomes them. These photographs are filled with dappled sunshine, laughter, health, and love. Here, for instance, is a photograph of five children who sit on the floor while they eat. Unlike the other children we have seen—stunted, wrinkled figures draped in rags—these kids look like kids. They have smooth, unlined faces and ample skin on their bones; they wear clean clothes, including shoes and socks; they do not look cowed or beaten. One girl, a ribbon in her hair, impishly smiles as she opens her mouth wide for what looks—could it be?—like a nice soup dumpling. A later photograph shows a smiling woman in a polka-dotted bathing suit as she feeds her fat, naked child in a leafy backyard, while another introduces us to a shy little boy with a teddy bear almost as big as he is. Children do especially well in these pictures: They smile and play and are frequently kissed. The grownups seem fine, too. In one photograph we see a score of handsome, nicely dressed revelers at a wedding celebration; seated at a long table loaded with bottles, candlesticks, china, and silverware, they smoke, cheer, and smile.

At first glance these pictures seem wonderfully ordinary and might even suggest that the bad was not all bad. But, even apart from the omnipresent stars, something is terribly wrong. The pictures of happy children, we learn from the text, were probably taken in autumn of 1943: almost a year after most of the ghetto’s children had been deported for immediate gassing at Chelmno. It was primarily the children of the ghetto administrators, and those whose parents had agreed to round up others, who were spared. (What would you do?) Indeed, most of the people in these pictures, who still look healthy and human, were almost certainly members of the ghetto’s so-called elite: policemen, members of the Judenrat, those with money. At worst, they betrayed others, hastening the hideous deaths of their brethren; at best, they were protected from, and apparently inured to, the suffering around them. And one more thing: Within a year almost all of them, and their children, would be murdered too.

How are we to regard such pictures, or, rather, the people in them? Were they monstrously indifferent to others, or tragically ignorant of their own impending fate? Certainly they were victims; were they collaborators too? Do we exult that a few were saved, if only for a short time and at a terrible price? Is it a victory that some were able, almost to the end, to sustain a “normal” family? What does it mean to save one child’s life at the expense of another child’s death? (What would you do?) Do Ross’ photographs show something valiant or something repulsive? In short: How should we act in the “waiting room of Death” (as writer Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, termed the Jewish ghettoes)? To look at these pictures is to be twisted by such questions, and to know that the answers to them are necessary to seek and yet impossible to find.

Susie Linfield is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism.

Reprinted with permission from The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield. © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Even more poignantly: The photographs were almost always taken by Jews.

David Shneer, a professor at the University of Colorado, writes in Through Soviet Jewish Eyes that the Soviet government wanted citizens to view these products of its nearly all-Jewish corps of photojournalists and believe that the Nazis had not distinguished among their victims.

“During World War II,” an article about the book in Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine reports, “the Soviets saw an advantage in framing the Nazi assault as being against the entire nation, not just Jewish people. As Shneer observes, there was a rationale: ‘Do you think a bunch of Russian peasants wanted to go fight a war because of Jews?’”

Take the photograph above. It was originally captioned, “Kerch resident P.I. Ivanova found her husband, who was tortured by the fascist executioners.” There is no note of the fact that her husband was likely one of 7,500 Kerch Jews murdered, for being Jews, before the Red Army retook that southern city.

Another, similar photograph was captioned, “V.S. Tereshchenko digs under bodies for her husband. On the right: the body of 67-year-old I. Kh. Kogan.” The name Tereshchenko (a Ukrainian surname) is still alive; the Kogan is not.

The photographer’s name? Mark Redkin.

A few months ago, Tablet Magazine editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse looked at how Roman Vishniac’s famous photographs have also been put to use crafting an alternate narrative for the Jews of Europe.

Prof Uncovers Early Holocaust Photos [Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine]
Related: A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac [NYT Magazine]

Two years ago, determined to do something different, Borden—whose father is Jewish—began taking pictures of Holocaust survivors after the idea came up in conversation with a friend. “When I went online and looked at bodies of work, there were people that had done portraits of survivors but they seemed to be portrayed as victims or as objects, old people with aged skin,” he said. Borden has taken a more naturalistic approach: He shoots his subjects—whom he has found through survivor organizations and by posting advertisements in Jewish newspapers—in their homes, using natural light and few special effects. Each photograph is also accompanied by a short note handwritten by its subject about his or her experience as a survivor. Borden has now photographed about 160 survivors, in England, Australia, and Israel. This month, he is coming to New York. “I think we’re just going to carry on doing it until there aren’t any more survivors,” he said.

The series-in-progress does not yet have a clear destination, though the project’s manager, Miriam Hechtman, said she aims for it to become traveling exhibit and a book. For now, some of the photographs appear on Borden’s website; others appear below for the first time.

Hechtman, who is also working on a documentary about Borden’s project, began traveling with him in Israel. Asked whether she had noticed any commonalities in the homes of the survivors she visited, she said, “I saw a lot of photos.”



• The legendary Leonard Nimoy, 79, announced his retirement from show business. [Before It's News]

• The Christian Broadcasting Network features an interview with photojournalist David Rubinger, who has documented much of Israel’s history and describes the face of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as “Like granite.” [CBN]

• Israel’s national museum unveiled a restored Renaissance-era Hebrew manuscript documenting Jewish law and adorned with gold and gems. [AP]

• Los Angeles’s South Robertson Neighborhood Council has elected Orthodox 15-year-old Rachel Lester, the youngest elected public representative in the city. [JTA]

• Virginia has recalled a license plate reading “14CV88,” allegedly a coded reference to Hitler. That may sound paranoid, but check out the photo of the truck that boasted it. [AP via VIN]

“What I find striking about the Nazi camps statistics is their impersonality, the namelessness of the victims,” the photographer, Maciek Nabrdalik, tells the Times. “This series is an attempt to give them faces and to breathe individuality and humanity into the detached historical accounts.”

Check these out.

One Last Sitting for Holocaust Survivors [Lens]

Portraits of Power [The New Yorker]

The pictures form the basis of an exhibition opening today and running through December 2 at Theprintspace Gallery in London. The exhibition, provocatively titled Kosherface, offers an unusually intimate glimpse into the world of the Lubavitch, a movement that manages to be at once visible and insular. Aranda’s arresting shots depict Lubavitchers in unexpected settings: a rabbi rowing a boat, a family seated in a studio, a child covering his mother’s pregnant belly.

Aranda, whose work has appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ, is primarily a fashion photographer. And while the work he has done with Hasidim is different from his mainstream material, there is some overlap. “The first thing apart from the rabbi’s sunny countenance was what he was wearing,” Aranda said, recalling his first meeting with his future landlord. “For Hasidic men it’s a very simple but very classic formula: the hat, the black suit, the shirt. These are basic staples of men’s fashion.” Aranda’s exhibit also includes portraits of color-smeared faces, garments, and hair. “I always thought it would be fun to experiment with color on what is very monochromatic clothing for the men,” he said. “It’s refreshing to see the hasidic in the context of fashion and beauty photography. I don’t want this to be a show just for Jews.”

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer, Is Dead at 92 [NYT]

If the cops were after political liberals, they had the right man. But Frank was an aesthetic subversive, not a Marxist one. At the time of his arrest, he was traveling around the United States on a Guggenheim fellowship, taking pictures for what he described as “a spontaneous record of a man seeing this country for the first time.”

The result of this trip, Frank’s book The Americans, is fifty years old this year and an exhibition that will travel from Washington to San Francisco and then to New York marks its birthday. The show is impressive in its size and its range. While it focuses on The Americans, it provides an overview of the man’s career, no small task when dealing with an artist with his talent for constant restlessness.

Frank, who was born in Zurich in 1924, is also a very prolific photographer. For The Americans, he took over 700 rolls of film during his somewhat haphazard journey across American and culled 83 to create his book. That ratio, daunting as it is, serves as a leading indicator of Frank’s perfectionism. Though Frank was already recognized as a major talent by the time he was 31, The Americans is not a model of technical mastery, especially not the kind that people had come to expect of documentary photography by the mid-1950s. The pictures are often out of focus. Some of them are very grainy. Some of them are tilted or get the lighting wrong. But the photographs were striking enough to make history. Frank has been the most influential photographer the last half-century.

The exhibition’s curator, Sarah Greenough, points out that in spite of Frank’s talent, he had a hard time getting published in American magazines because editors felt that his photographs were too personal. That strong, subjective vision marks The Americans and helps account for the willed and willful technical “mistakes” in Frank’s work. Take for instance the photograph of a jukebox in a New York bar. The highlights in the mirrors are just too bright (especially in comparison to the murkiness of the bar itself) and a shadowy arm cuts across the jukebox itself. Those highlights and that arm are precisely the point, however. A number of his photographs (such as the one of an elevator operator in Florida) are about speed and the remarkable ability of people who are rushing not to notice things. The uncanny light that shines from the jukebox seems to transfigure the machine and because of the perspective, that dark arm seems, quite literally, to brush past it. Unlike the man, the camera sees and so, you have to suppose, do we.

In The Americans, Frank shows a remarkable empathy for forlorn or forgotten things: for merchandise not yet bought, for empty gas stations, and for buildings at night. He also reveals a similar empathy for those who used to be called, however quaintly, the underprivileged. They include autoworkers, Latino transvestites, and especially (remember—this was the 1950s) blacks.

Frank is less forgiving when it comes to self-satisfied white folks. Some of his targets are a little too easy: rich women in furs in the lobbies of hotels or at garden parties, politicians on the hustings or at conventions, even confident looking cowboys in bars. White workers do not suffer this treatment, however, as in the case of the bored elevator operator, who is ignored by the blurs pushing past her.

It’s hardly surprising then that the book’s first critics found it harsh. Some were convinced that it was un-American. To be sure, the book must have been unsettling then and it retains some of that quality although we might now be too comfortable with its view of consumerism and race relations.

The weary, existentialist alienation that pervades it might be as historical as the world it depicts, a world of drive-ins, cars with fins, and pictures of Ike. Frank was a European. He allied himself with the New York avant-garde of his time. He had a number of friends amongst the Abstract Expressionists and was very close to Allen Ginsberg and the Beat writers. He shared their collective distaste for the man in the gray flannel suit and the industrial flattening-out of individual creativity.

Several factors save The Americans from becoming a mere historical artifact. The first, and most basic, is that the book displays neither the Abstract Expressionists’ self-mythologizing heroism nor the Beats’ stoned and goofy sense of prophetic vision. The contrast between Frank and Ginsberg and Kerouac (who wrote the introduction to The Americans) is most visible in the movie Pull My Daisy, which Kerouac wrote and Frank co-directed. In the film, Ginsberg, the poets Peter Orlofsky and Gregory Corso, the composer David Amram, and the painter Larry Rivers cavort, spout pleasant nonsense, riff on religious themes, and play some impressive post-bebop jazz. Interestingly enough, the film only looks like one of Frank’s photographs when the narration is silent or when the camera pans past inanimate objects. The Americans might critique America, but it has none of the Beats’ manic noise. Like the Beats, it is fascinated by speed. Unlike them, it is remarkably silent.

Brooklyn, New York, is a central location on the map of Jewish American migration. At its height, in the 1950s, the borough’s Jewish population numbered more than a million. Today, many thousands still make their home there, as evidenced by the vast number of synagogues thriving in neighborhoods as diverse as Park Slope (mostly reform and conservative) and Borough Park (mostly Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox). But Jews have long since abandoned other neighborhoods, leaving their synagogues to fend for themselves. Some have been converted into churches or commercial spaces, others simply leveled.

Photographer Thomas Roma has spent years photographing Brooklyn’s houses of worship—of every denomination. But he found himself particularly drawn to synagogues for the stories the buildings seemed to tell about their neighborhood’s and congregation’s past, present, and future. He’s now collected his beautiful, large-scale, black-and-white photographs of these places in a book titled On Three Pillars: Torah, Worship, and the Practice of Loving Kindness.

We visited with Roma to find out what draws him to these houses of worship—even those that, today, are nothing more than vacant lots.

Photos copyright © 2007 Thomas Roma. All rights reserved

Lichtenstein then embarked on what would become a decade-long effort to collect not just photographs and other artifacts, but also the memories of past and present residents of an area in flux. The fruits of her labor have now been assembled in a book, On Brick Lane, published by Hamish Hamilton.

Recently, Lichtenstein gave Nextbook’s Hugh Levinson a tour of bustling Brick Lane, making stops along the way to point out remnants of the once thriving, now all-but-absent, Jewish community.

Left: Brick Lane near the turn of the century. Right: Local historian Bill Fishman in front of the Fieldgate Street Synagogue and the East London Mosque, 2005.

Synagogue photo: Rachel Lichtenstein.

Cynthia, Montclair, New Jersey, 2002 (© 2007 by Andrea Stern)

As a teenager, Andrea Stern hated being the subject of her shutterbug father’s photographs. As an adult, she turned the tables, picking up a camera of her own and taking pictures of her large, affluent family not just in moments of celebration—horas at weddings, bar mitzvah mornings, and holiday gatherings—but at meals, in quiet prayer, and at the beach.

Many of these images are now collected in a new book titled Inheritance, which reads almost like a diary, capturing the intimate moments and love exchanged among Stern’s close-knit relatives. Andrea Stern speaks with Nextbook about her inheritances, from the material privileges she enjoyed to the emotional legacy her family—and every family—bestows on its children.