It’s a long way from Big Sky country to the shtetls of Lithuania. Barbara Michelman made that journey, once physically and then countless times in her studio.
Nearly 10 years ago, the Montana-based photographer traveled to the land of her forebears, and was so moved by the experience that she converted her feelings into art.
Michelman’s photo exhibition, “The Past is Prologue,” is on display at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center.
Her cousin, who happens to be a Marin JCC member, showed Michelman’s work to Joanne Greene, the director of the JCC’s Koret Taube Center for Jewish Peoplehood. Once the connection was made, the exhibition began to take shape.
More collage than photojournalism, the pictures blend images of Lithuania past and present, drawing on photos taken during her trip, as well as text and archival materials available in the public domain. Ultimately, she honors a once-thriving Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust.
“It’s almost like crafting a poem,” Michelman says of her work, while busily hanging frames at the JCC. “You don’t know at first what it wants to be.”
Some of those “poems” include sepia images of rubble-strewn streets and old snapshots of family members. Others capture modern Lithuania, with contrasting scenes of factory workers, ornate churches and crumbling Jewish gravestones.
Her pictures evoke an emptiness Michelman sensed when she traveled across Lithuania.
“Wherever you go,” she says, “there are ghost towns, cemeteries overgrown — that is, the ones that weren’t desecrated. You go into some village and there will be some forgotten monument to when they took [the Jews] from the village.”
She cites the statistics. Before the Holocaust, Lithuania had one of the highest per capita Jewish populations in Europe. The capital, Vilnius, was 40 percent Jewish. “Can you imagine what that meant to wipe everybody out?” she asks.
Born in Brooklyn 68 years ago, Michelman grew up surrounded by the Yiddishkeit of her extended Litvak family. She heard stories about relatives back in Lithuania — the ones that got out, the ones that didn’t make it.
She went on to have a career in film and television, both as a writer and as a lighting director (a precursor to her photography passion).
A cousin asked Michelman to accompany her on a trip to the Old Country, in part to research family history. In the days before the Russian Revolution, Michelman’s grandfather worked for the czar. The family owned grain mills and a tract of land in the town of Ponerai.
Though ownership had long since passed on to the Soviet government and then others, Michelman was thrilled to walk on land that once belonged to her family.
“The day we went to the property where they had the mill and family home was an exquisite day in June,” she says. “I kept thinking how beautiful it must have been to be playing by this river on that exquisite piece of land. On that day it didn’t feel haunted.”
The Jews of Lithuania suffered enormously under the Nazi onslaught. Most of Michelman’s relatives had gotten out, but not all. They ended up in a mass grave.
While there, Michelman took hundreds of photos, but she wasn’t sure how to process her Lithuania experience artistically. She admits that for years she was “stuck.”
“I didn’t know where I was going with it,” she recalls. “My big fear was I didn’t want to be talking in clichés, something that was calcified.”
Her résumé includes everything from fashion, portrait and product photography to naturalistic fine art photography made all the more natural by living just south of Missoula, Mont.
For her Lithuania project she needed something different. Over time, she developed her collage style, and now, 10 years after her trip, Michelman unveils her work.
Why call it “The Past is Prologue?”
Says Michelman, “In the arc of our lives, past is prologue — and it is left to each generation, as Hannah Arendt once said, to stand ‘committed witness’ to what is before us.”
Barbara Michelman’s “The Past is Prologue” is on display through Sept. 13 in the Isaacs Gallery of the Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro Road, San Rafael. Free. Information: www.marinjcc.org