Witnesses to evil who did not just survive, but thrived
Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors
Imperial War Museum, London SE1
To get to the photography exhibition Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors at the Imperial War Museum, you have to walk past a crumpled, rusted car that was salvaged from a street bombing in Baghdad in 2007.
The car is an artwork by Jeremy Deller, and a muscular symbol of the wreckage caused by war, but if there is a message to be gleaned from the 60 portraits upstairs, it is that such wreckage does not always take as obvious or as swift a form.
Generations is a joint venture by the IWM and the Royal Photographic Society, of which the 13 photographers selected to take part are either members or fellows of, or in the case of the Duchess of Cambridge, patron.
That the standard of photography is high, then, is a given, and I have no hesitation in including the Duchess in that appraisal. In fact, her two portraits, in which survivors Steven Frank and Yvonne Bernstein – each holding treasured wartime mementos and pictured with their grandchildren – emerge from a rich, almost enamelled dark, are enchanting.
On the whole, there is a curiously sprightly feel to the exhibition, perhaps because many of the photographers chose to work outside, and nearly all of the portraits were made this spring. Moreover, the show’s rhythms and repetitions suggest that its emphasis is the fulfilling lives that the subjects have lived (all of them in Britain) since the war, rather than the unimaginable horrors they endured during it.
Presumably with this in mind, the Duchess is not the only photographer here to have pictured the survivor with their descendants. Of these the more successful – if one can even use that word in this context – allow the fragile ties between each generation to emerge subtly. Carolyn Mendelson’s portrait of Rosl Schatzberger, pictured holding a photograph of a relative killed in Auschwitz, and next to her daughter Lesley, is an elegant example.
The pictures I tended to be most captivated by, though, were those in which the survivor was alone. Tom Hunter’s portrait of Sigi Ciffer in his garden, blanket on his knees, petals at his feet, face lifted to the sky; Karen Knorr’s image of Sir Ben Helfgott standing, loafers polished, shirt crisp, in his comfy living room.
It’s always hard to define what makes one picture more memorable than another, and especially so here, where every photograph is important, every story vital. I think there is something to be said about connection, though. If I have one tiny gripe about the exhibition, it is that the background provided is frustratingly scant. The stories are everything here and only some of the photographs supply it. When they do, the combined effect is beyond forceful – but a little too often I was left feeling barred from the emotional exchange for which this type of show cries out.