Henryk Ross (1910-1991) photographically documented numerous aspects of Jewish individuals sent to prison inside the Łódź Ghetto in Nazi inhabited Poland from 1940 to 1944. Officially, Ross worked for the Statistics Department of the ghetto’s Jewish Administration, photographing the ghetto’s Jewish residents for identification cards and Nazi propaganda. On the other hand, Ross risked his distinct privileges and his life to photo the truth of day-to-day ghetto existence. This was particularly important as Jews were banned from owning photographic equipment. Ross understood the importance of photographically recording the Nazi’s genocide to repudiate those who would not believe or whose who later on would deny the Holocaust/Shoah.
Ross’s photographic archive lays bare the issues regarding leadership, social class, required labor, starvation, and the obliteration of religious organizations in a controlled environment where death was the destination. When the Germans chose to liquidate the ghetto, Ross buried his negatives. He and his partner managed to make it through, but upon digging them up after liberation he found a number of negatives had been damaged by groundwater. Astoundingly, this chance destruction transformed much of the negatives from actual depictions into remarkable, haunted, poetic expressions of what had actually taken place.
Robert Hirsch
To find out and see more about Ross’s work go to the VASA Journal on Images and Culture project essays and view Robert Hirsch’s “Photography and the Holocaust: Then & & Now” Table of Contents at http://vjic.org/vjic2/?page_id=6312 and/or www.lightresearch.net
This series of VASA essays, Photography and the Holocaust: Then & & Now, is being expanded into an CEPA Gallery (www.cepagallery.org) job that will open in January 2024. It will feature over 15 modern worldwide artists whose practice incorporates new and reimagined works that come to grips with the Holocaust and its long-lasting effect today. The strategy includes a virtual walkthrough and online neighborhood gallery, public art installations, a virtual and live speaker series, neighborhood discussions, youth and adult workshops, and community programming, along with a virtual Holocaust timeline and publication with essays by historians and scholars.
For more on this subject see: Robert Hirsch’s Ghosts: French Holocaust Children brochure at www.lightresearch.net