A selection of 52 color digital images from Ehrlich\’s documentation of Nazi bureaucracy from Hitler\’s Final Solution will be on display in \”The Holocaust Archive Revealed\” at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica beginning Tuesday
At first glance, \”Testimony\” (Aperture, $40) looks like an innocent-enough coffee table book of Israel-themed photographs. Thumb through the first few pages and you\’ll see examples of photographer Gillian Laub\’s excellent portraiture. Each color image is accompanied by a simple enough quote from the subject, an Arab or Jew sharing the same bit of the Holy Land.
Los Angeles photographer Naomi Solomon capped off her informal summer presentation series \”Settlers: A Photographic Journey of the Life and Disengagement of the Jews Living in Gaza\” at Nessah Synagogue in Beverly Hills last week, drawing more than 150 people.
Whether you\’re trying to capture a wedding, b\’nai mitzvah or 50th anniversary celebration, the day will come and go whether you\’re ready for it or not. Unless you\’re prepared, the opportunity to capture family history can easily slip through your fingers.
Upcoming Photographic exhibitions.
In his raw, autobiographical monologue, \”Who Is Floyd Stearn?\” actor Michael Raynor struts onstage with a swagger reminiscent of James Caan. Raynor, playing himself, jabs a finger at a faded photograph.\nThe photo was taken on 185th Street in Queens, on his grandmother\’s lawn. In the photo, an athletic, brawny man embraces a 3-year-old. The man is Raynor\’s father, Floyd Stearn. The smiling boy is young Michael, who clutches a toy banjo, his blond bangs peeking out from a cowboy hat.\n\nRaynor tells the audience that, even at 40, he cannot discuss the photo; should anyone pressure him, he angrily departs.\n\n\”Every time I see the picture I cry,\” he adds quietly. \”That\’s why I can\’t look at it. I see the happiness in my face, and it scares me. I\’m hoping it won\’t go away.\”
Paul Kurzberg, an Israeli from Pardess Hanna, was in the office of his New Jersey moving company on Sept. 11, 2001, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
Like many Israeli movers in the New York area, Kurzberg, who was in his late 20s, was not legally authorized to work in the United States. But on Sept. 11, that thought was distant from his mind as he and his friends piled into a company van after the second plane hit the World Trade Center to find a better vantage point to photograph the historic terrorist attack.
It proved to be a critical mistake.
Gerda Straus Mathan, a well-respected, Berkeley-based photographer of Jewish and other subjects who studied with Ansel Adams and lived for a time in Southern California, died Aug. 10 following a long illness. She was 83.
In contemporary artist Gottfried Helnwein\’s painting, \”Epiphany I,\” an Aryan Madonna-like figure sits holding a naked, uncircumcised new born boy, while some SS officers stand around her, critically sizing up mother and child. The painting is a reproduction of a Nazi propaganda photograph in which Hitler was the central figure; here in the painting, the mother is.
\”Epiphany I: Adoration of the Magi,\” one of five works by Helnwein currently on exhibit at the Schmeidler-Goetz gallery in West Hollywood, is not the first work of art to explore an uncomfortable subject like the Holocaust.
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