Holocaust
Sites |
Karaites | Soviet
Jews | Credits
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Introduction
What
does it take for an independent photographer to succeed at his or
her craft? By definition, the working life of the freelancer
in almost any field is intensely competitive. For a photographer,
the possession of raw talent, a good eye, proper training, and technical
skills alone do not guarantee either fame or fortune. Flexibility,
entrepreneurial drive, wide-ranging interests, and the ability (or
sheer good luck) to make the right contacts at the right time—these
are all critical ingredients contributing toward both artistic and
personal fulfillment. They are qualities that the independent photographer
Ira Nowinski possesses in abundance.
Nowinski has been a fixture on San Francisco’s artistic and
cultural scene for more than three decades. The diverse commissions
that have come his way reveal his acute eye and versatility as a
photographer. Among the abiding themes that Nowinski’s photographs
reflect are his passion for social justice, his fascination with
the urban scene, and his longstanding involvement with the literary,
performing, and visual arts.
Seymour Fromer, the founding director (now director-emeritus) of
the Judah L. Magnes Museum (Berkeley), played a pivotal role in
the three major projects that are represented in this online exhibition.
The images that are reproduced here are among those exhibited from
August to November 2004 in the Peterson Gallery at Green Library,
as part of the exhibition Ira Nowinski: The Photographer As
Witness.
In 2001, the Stanford University Libraries acquired 15,000 negatives,
1,200 study prints, and 600 archival prints from three separate
series by Nowinski: In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics
of Holocaust Memorials; Karaite Jews in Egypt, Israel,
and the San Francisco Bay Area; and Soviet Jews in San Francisco.
Why do the Stanford University Libraries acquire photograph collections
such as this one? Their esthetic and documentary qualities speak
for themselves. Above and beyond that, Ira Nowinski’s photographs
constitute an extensive archive that serves the purposes of research
and scholarship. Taken as a whole, this collection also opens a
window to the creative process —“the artist at work”—
in this case, the photographer himself.
Zachary Baker
Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections
Stanford University Libraries
•••••••••
What Remains to Be Seen
A tangled
roomful of discarded orthopedic braces and prosthetic limbs —
whose? Discarded — why? An ample canister of Zyklon B gas
— this photograph also fills a
16 x 20 frame with black-and-white, black-and-gray textures close
enough to touch.
“Show me!,” we say, and “You’ve got to see
it to believe it.” Or, “I can’t believe my eyes.”
“Can’t you see?” “Now I see it!” Ocular
proof we want, evidence (from videre “to see”), eye-witness.
But what if it’s not the actual moment, and we’re not
actually there to see the event itself? Still, “One picture
is worth a thousand words.” But if that picture’s been
taken afterwards, showing us not the moment but its memento, a visual
memo, belated news? This challenge, this act of witness Ira Nowinski
takes on.
Lies nicht mehr — schau! Schau nicht mehr — geh! Survivor-poet
Paul Celan was trying to expose the psychic actuality of what happened
in Nazi-ridden Europe: “Read no more — look! Look no
more — go!” Nowinski does the same for us, when he goes
and looks hard and close and clear through his lens at buildings,
walls, fences, gates, gallows, equipment, signs, inscriptions, cemeteries,
and monuments.
Of Polish and Hungarian descent, Ira Nowinski was the first in his
family born in the United States, in New York in 1942. During the
late 1980s, in Germany and Eastern Europe, his art brought him into
fitting memory of a thousand-year civilization atrociously destroyed
in a thousand days or so.
At Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, prisoners officially
categorized as “return not desired” and “annihilation
through work” lugged stone slabs on their backs up 186 steps
from the granite quarry. SS guards made some who survived leap to
their deaths. Nothing can now re-present this agony, so Nowinski
gets us quite close, near the bottom of these now-empty, rough-hewn,
enduring granite steps, and simply points his camera upward. We
may be put in mind of Sergei Eisenstein’s horrific Odessa
Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, where Tsarist troops
massacre fleeing civilians and as a mother is shot dead, her baby
in its carriage lurches down the steps. But even that falls short.
In another of Nowinski’s views, the rolling bucolic landscape
outside Mauthausen is seen at a distance, through barbed wire. Ironic
and true enough, except that this “barbed wire” is not
electrified. In fact, its oversized spikes are of thickly fashioned
iron — part of the camp’s postwar memorial monument.
I’m not suggesting that the photographer falsifies reality,
or even that he urges memorials as a form of recovering the truth.
The stylized iron he forefronts for us only incites that part of
our mind which must try and fail to realize what happened here,
in eyeshot of nature and life as it should have been.
In the Sachsenhausen infirmary, as the camp commandant (who later
died in Stalin’s Gulag) explained at his trial, “There
was a height gauge and a table with an eye scope. There were also
some SS wearing doctor uniforms. There was a hole at the back of
the height gauge. While an SS was measuring the height of a prisoner,
another one placed his gun in the hole and killed him by shooting
in his neck. Behind the height gauge there was another room where
we played music in order to cover the noise of the shooting.”
And there was also a pathology department at Sachsenhausen, where
autopsies yielded results from medical experiments. As frontispiece
to the groundbreaking volume Nowinski created with historian Sybil
Milton, In Fitting Memory (1991), we see pictured a window of this
building, its own now-paintcracked white frame filling the photo’s
frame. Through the window a bald, utterly emaciated inmate in striped
garb stares out at us — or seems to. In fact, this staring,
seizing visage is a photograph from an exhibit inside. What’s
more, Nowinski’s caption reads: “Reflected photographic
image…”
So we must move through time, distance, an American artist, a window,
a reflection, and an old photographic image — through six
removes toward…just what? An acute sense of what remains to
be seen.
“I always overexposed by at least a 1/2 stop,” Ira Nowinski
tells us in his book; he wanted “sharper resolution.”
Technique matters essentially, and may make all the difference when
it comes to crucial witness. Overexposure yields “open shadows,”
as it’s called, more detail and differentiation in the dark
areas. That is, we discern more.
For “contrast control,” says Nowinski, he chose paper
and toner that “added shadow and detail.” His developers
for printing “strengthened the blacks” and gave him
“full tonal range.” Wanting more and always more reality,
art intervenes, it revises or sees again, which is the work of imagination
in these images, seeking more complex darks and lights, more palpable
cement and bricks and stone and wood and iron.
Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen, Paul Celan said after “that
which happened,” as he called it: “No one / witnesses
for the / witness.” But that’s not necessarily so.
John
Felstiner
Professor of English, Stanford University
•••••••••
The
Story of Soviet Jewish Resettlement
Jewish
Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) helped more than 40,000
newcomers from the former Soviet Union start new lives in the Bay
Area beginning in the late 1970s and continuing today. The vast
majority arrived in two major waves of emigration — from 1978
to 1984, and after perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union
in 1989. Over all these years, two overarching goals have guided
this massive resettlement effort: to assist émigré
families to become self-sufficient, and, in the longer term, to
involve them in American — and American-Jewish — communal
life.
After
years of grueling political struggle to free Soviet Jewry from communist
rule, hundreds and then thousands were finally arriving, and we
understood from the beginning that this flow of newcomers into our
community had historic importance with implications for generations
to come. With this in mind, we were delighted when Ira Nowinski
approached us with his proposal to document the local resettlement
effort. We were impressed with his sensitivity and evident talent,
and we worked closely with him to arrange for the intimate and open
entry into the personal lives of newcomers, resettlement workers,
and American volunteers that are so well captured in his wonderful
photographs.
The
migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to new homes primarily
in the United States and Israel represents one of the largest population
shifts in Jewish history. Out of the nearly 1.3 million people who
left, more than 400,000 came to the United States. Those who came
to America were given legal refugee status as a persecuted minority
after interviews by the U.S. State Department. In the 1970s, newcomers
came without relatives to a strange new land, but U.S. emigration
policy became increasingly more restrictive, eventually requiring
first degree relatives as a condition for entry into America.
From
the very beginning of immigration in the early 1970s, JFCS was the
anchor for newcomers. Bilingual social work staff and a cadre of
hundreds of specially trained volunteers arranged for their needs
to be met. JFCS staff and volunteers provided thousands of hours
of service beginning with the welcoming of refugees at the airport,
providing counseling and cultural orientation, helping with food
and rent, referrals for jobs, health care, English language instruction,
and the myriad of other needs required by a refugee population with
little clothing, furniture or money, and massive health and mental
health needs.
As
with most refugees and immigrants, starting anew was not easy. Soviet
refugees had to learn a new alphabet and a new language, along with
the “tribal ways” of their new home. Finding employment,
particularly in the professions in which they had been trained,
was enormously difficult for many. In contrast to most immigrating
groups — composed of mostly younger people — Soviet
Jews arrived primarily in multi-generational extended families.
More than 22% of those arriving were over the age of sixty-five,
necessitating the development of an extensive system of care for
thousands of monolingual, very low income émigré elderly
— a system which JFCS continues to offer to this day.
Despite
the burdens encountered, the arrival of Soviet Jews is by all accounts
one of the most successful immigration stories in American history.
The combination of a relatively well-educated population, and a
host community that welcomed and helped them onto their feet, ensured
a good adjustment for most, recognizing that in any mass migration
there will always be those with very painful and sometimes insurmountable
personal and family problems requiring JFCS’ continuing care.
The talents and entrepreneurial spirit of the émigré
population, aided by the support of the American Jewish community,
resulted in quick entry into the work force for most, relatively
low rates of long-term public welfare dependency, and the development
of a vibrant and resilient local Russian émigré community
which has made great contributions in business, engineering, arts,
music and, especially, the high-tech industry.
After
twenty-five years of emigration, new Americans from the former Soviet
Union are now giving back, and taking their place as leaders in
our Jewish and American community. Perhaps most gratifying of all
is the knowledge that their children — many of whom are depicted
in Ira Nowinski’s photos — have matured into integrated
and successful members of our community as well, an inextricable
part of the rich tapestry of American and Jewish life.
Of
the hundreds of letters our agency has received from grateful refugee
families over the past twenty-five years, few have reminded us of
the meaning of this historic émigré absorption effort
like this one:
We
have seen the hard years of revolution, famines, World Wars, Nazism,
Stalinism, and Communism. More than once, we have seen people’s
cruelty. Now, in the U.S.A., we are impressed most by the kindness
and big-heartedness of the people. May God bless you for keeping
the Biblical commandment to welcome the stranger, and for remembering
that we all were once strangers in the land of Egypt. . . .
Dr.
Anita Friedman
Executive Director, Jewish Family and Children’s Services
of San Francisco,
the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties
