Layers of Memory, Layers of the Present

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Once upon a time, there was a nature preserve located on the site of a former quarry, just ten kilometers from the city center of Krakow. And Poland being what it is, it turns out that the Bonarka Nature Preserve sat on the site of the Plaszow Concentration Camp. That location, made famous in the Stephen Spielberg film “Schindler’s List”, was erected over the site of two Jewish cemeteries.

Plaszow contained two sections: one for Jews and one for Poles. As Soviet armies approached in the summer of 1944, S.S. leaders eliminated both camp sections, then dug up the mass graves and burned the bodies in huge piles in an attempt to eliminate evidence of the mass murder.

In an attempt to remember the past, a group of Krakow residents started a volunteer reclamation project to dig around Plaszow to find the original pre-camp Jewish gravesites. Fort Worth photographer Loli Kantor volunteered to go to Poland and dig in the soil. It was the beginning of her the journey to discover what happened to her mother and father’s family in Poland prior to the Holocaust.

Since that initial visit, Kantor’s journey has subsequently taken her to Poland and Ukraine six times to photograph the living remnants of those pre-Holocaust Jewish communities. Her photographs, a mixture of art and photojournalism, form the corpus of the exhibition “There Was a Forest: Jewish Life In Eastern Europe Today 2005-2008”.

“There Was A Forest” will be on display from March 7-May 21 at the Robert I. Kahn Gallery at Congregation EmanuEl, 1500 Sunset Boulevard. A reception for the artist will be held on March 17 from 6:30-8:30 P.M. The exhibition is part of FotoFest 2010, the biennial photography program held at more than 80 Houston venues. This year’s theme is contemporary American photography.

Kantor’s mother died in childbirth having her in January 1952. Her father died when she was 14.

“Not having my parents there to ask about our family’s past, I always had the sense I wanted to go to Poland,” said Kantor, “not to visit for a week but to do research in the archives. I speak a little Polish so going wasn’t such an overwhelming idea.”

Volunteering at the Krakow-based reclamation project gave Kantor the opportunity to visit the archive in her father’s hometown of Czestochowa. It was a town where Jews comprised one-quarter of the population before the Holocaust. But Kantor discovered she wasn’t satisfied with visits to archives and cemeteries.  

She wanted to visit living communities.

“I heard about communities like that in Ukraine, small enclaves that are still remnants of the shtetls,” said Kantor. “So I went in 2005 with some contacts I had made to the western part of Ukraine, the trans-Carpathians. I wanted to photograph people, Holocaust survivors, and anything else I founded. I didn’t have a set plan. I work very intuitively. I go and if I see something interesting or important, I stick around.”

Like the soil where she dug outside Krakow, Kantor found both the past and present layered together in western Ukraine.

“For example, I found a small town (Drohobych) with a major, unoccupied synagogue building standing in the middle of downtown,” described Kantor.  “The building was a furniture store during the Soviet era. Now both the local Jewish and non-Jewish community was attempting renovate the building to at least create a little prayer room. For the non-Jews, they made friendships with the local Jews and they saw something positive needed to be done with the building. They helped with their hands, with their labor, because there was no money available. Everybody is poor.”

Kantor’s photos from her initial 2005 visit are all black and white. The subject matter consisted mainly of survivors and reminisces of empty synagogues and artifacts. But Kantor moved beyond these initial impressions. She realized her role was to use the camera to record and provide visual evidence of these people—particularly since most of them are elderly and will not live longer than ten more years.

This desire to interpret the past and document the present led to Kantor’s decision to use two separate techniques in her work.
Kantor’s 13 x19 color photos reflect the colors of the places she visits. These are reflected in the fabrics and domestic hues of everyday life.  In contrast, Kantor’s palladium works are contact prints made from black and white negatives. The palladium photos are small in size and look like images from old photo albums. Palladium prints come from a 19th century technique in which each photo is hand made and unique. Thus, these photos have a timeless element as if one was looking over an imaginary viewer’s shoulder at an old family album. For example, although the photo “Preparing For Purim At the Kosher Soup Kitchen” was made in 2007, everything--from the wooden table and chairs, the kitchen implements, to the body-builds and clothing of the subjects--suggests a scene out of the past.

On one level, the large color shots and the small black and white photos appear to be two bodies of work. On another level, they reflect the interplay between past and present, between memory and the gritty present of Ukrainian rural life. Thus Kantor’s exhibition functions as a sort of visual archeology: the understanding of human culture through the recovery and documentation of material culture. In this visual recovery and documentation, we understand what was lost.
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To learn more about the artist’s work, go to www.lolikantor.com  To see the entire FotoFest schedule, go to www.fotofest.org

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