When Elliot Ross saw the grainy Holocaust-era footage of a pair of boxcar doors closing on a forlorn teenage girl as she glumly stared at the camera, he was, like everyone else, moved and disturbed.
But, unlike most, Ross was struck with another thought. “That girl,” he noted, “looks like my sister.”
And, also unlike most, Ross is a talented photographer. So, the brief boxcar clip spurred an eight-and-a-half year odyssey. The San Franciscan shot countless portraits of scores of Jewish women and coupled his jarringly unglamorous photos with Shoah-related quotations. His powerful and evocative product is “Yehudhith,” perhaps the weightiest coffee-table book ever published.
Ross hopes the juxtaposition of Holocaust literature and photographs of modern Jewish women — who may look so very similar to the person you kissed before you left home this morning or peer at in the mirror — will bring a sense of immediacy to one of history’s darkest moments and break down the emotional safety zones people erect for themselves when dealing with the Holocaust.
He aims to “connect contemporary experiences to that historical period in an emotional sense,” he said. “Seeing the text from that period and matching it with the face of someone who might be a relative, a friend, someone you see walking down the street — that’s a different impact than from a historical photograph.”
The Holocaust-related texts form a patchwork narrative, starting with Hitler’s musing about “Europeanized” Jewish women who had “taken on a human look … I even took them for Germans,” and finishing with poet Paul Celan’s haunting refrain:
To a mouth
For which it was a thousandword,
Lost —
I lost a word
That was left to me:
Sister
So, when readers tell Ross they see the tumultuous arc of the Holocaust in the texts, he smiles and knows “they get it.”
Ross’ images and the accompanying text are currently in the midst of a unique three-part European tour: After their current stop in Slovakia, the exhibit travels to Prague and then Krakow. Ross smiles and notes that the somewhat terse e-mails from the Slovakian curator have noted “very strong reactions. And I don’t know what that means. According to the curator, strong, good reactions.”
He hopes to take the show on an American tour as well, and, randomly enough, has struck a tentative deal for a summer exhibition at the Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama. He’s also had a few casual conversations with a yet-unnamed synagogue in San Francisco about bringing the show there.
The book’s launch party was held last year at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Ross said proceeds from book sales will go to the museum’s Charlotte Salomon Fund for Jewish Artists. The book can be ordered online via a link on Ross’ Web site: www.elliotross.com.
For Ross, “Yehudhith” represents the culmination of a mind-boggling amount of work and worry. He spent the better part of nine years researching texts and scouting for subjects. In order to glean one or, at the very most, two shots of his female subjects, Ross spent a minimum of three hours in the studio, talking his nonprofessional subjects into the right mindset for his dark subject matter.
And, for the photographer, it’s into the breach, once more. He plans to rekindle his work on a project revolving around the Holocaust-related poetry of Paul Celan, an undertaking he neglected to concentrate on in “Yehudith.”
“His poetry is so powerful,” said Ross of the German-born poet who fled to France to elude the Nazis but eventually committed suicide by drowning himself in the Seine.
“It’s difficult to do anything visual that doesn’t pale to the written word.”
“Yehudhith” by Elliot Ross (Hawkhaven Press, 105 pages, $45).