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In Perspective, Planet: “Beyond The Shadows!” A Major Photographic Exhibition In Santa Monica California

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Judy Glickman Lauder, innovative, awesome and solemn record of her documentation of European Concentration Camps, “Beyond the Shadows” opened last night to public view.


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It’s at the most admired and respected Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, curated by Peter Fetterman himself.

It will be ongoing until the 26th October 2019, Wed to Sat 11:00 am to 6:00 pm, located at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Gallery A1, Santa Monica, California, 90404.


From Birkenau, Majdanek, Auchwitz and Treblinka in Poland, Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia and Dacheau Germany we are taken to just a scant seven of the thousands of industrially organized work and death extermination camps of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

In merely 11 years, the Nazis, (the happenstance fruit of the core church doctrine of permanent antisemitism), the fellow-citizen supported slaughter, in Europe, overtook all the previous killings of Jews since Emperor Constantine first established this unremitting policy and practice.

The Nazis were the most efficient servants of this normalized core value of Europe’s exclusion, marginalization and hatred of Jews. Austria and Germany were merely the highly efficient modern actors in this universally repeated traveling tragedy.

In each of these seven camp locations, Glickman Lauder’s reversed infrared and regular film documentation highlights, without comment, the drab ordinariness about this entire horror story.

That is why it’s so gripping and important.

Her work, remarkably is silent. It merely bears witness in mundane detail of death trains, the somber humorous sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei!”, bed bunks and the dissection table, sinks and empty paths between buildings.

There is not a word of reprimand, record of a single wound, fallen child or smoke stacks of the burnt millions! Absent is hatred or comment.

Just the ignorable shadows of the greatest willful crime against humanity can be experienced.

The photographer has no malice. She holds no desire for revenge.

But there’s a wish, a hope and a heartfelt prayer that is evoked in all the visitors to the exhibition. It’s as follows:

Our diverse cultures will work to achieve a universal understanding of the innate worth in all of us. Further, hatred of any minority is always disgusting and can no longer be tolerated. As a consequence we must block and frustrate all who promote such evil.

I commend this exhibition to everyone. If you can’t make it, you can visit the website, here and in addition purchase the book of the entire set the artist’s formidable work.

Asher Kelman
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I will select pictures for individual comment shortly.

Thanks for following.

Please feel free to comment and see if you can recognize the unusual effects of using infrared film to present ordinariness in a startling way.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Use of infra red film here is creative. Without altering object, we just see everything from behind time, as infrared here allows us to see things in reverse, with leaves reflecting infrared where there were once captives.

The leaves perhaps tell us about the countless humanity deprived, enslaved, humiliated, gassed and then burnt in disposed of in the smoke of Mercedes ovens!

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Visit and linger enough to bear witness.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Here, the crepuscular light is strange. In good times, such energy breaking through thick bellowing clouds signifies renewal and hope.

Here the photographer’s reversal with infrared film sets an opposite oppressive mood of desolation.


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Glickman Lauder’s grim sky brings Dante’s unearthly dark vision to the level of those who were sentenced to oblivion!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Today, such a train station would be quaint.

Then it was the destination to a facade of a wonderful imaginary but fake creative artist camp for displaced Jews, disguised thus with fake walls and shop fronts, soccer courts and theater to demonstrate to the investigating Red Cross, how well the Jewish artists were being treated.

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In reality, this served as a major railway switching point to Auschwitz and other work camp extermination centers.

Asher
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Stunning photos (with an unusual technique) of a "situation" that is beyond "stunning" for its evil and horror.

Perhaps 30 years ago my late first wife, Bobbie, and I toured Europe, and were able to visit Auschwitz. After our visit to the camp, we went into the town and had lunch at a small cafe, dining al fresco. There was an older American couple seated at the next table, and we struck up a conversation. I mentioned that we had visited the camp. The fellow asked, "Did you get to Birkenau?" (Birkenau, sometimes spoken of as "Auschwitz II", was a "satellite" of the camp at Auschwitz.)

"No, we didn't", I said, but seeing the B- number tattooed on his arm, I said, "but I see you did." He in fact had been interned at Birkenau as a young boy, I think with his mother.

It turned out that he was on the faculty of The George Washington University, where during that same period I taught in their Continuing Engineering Education Program.

Thanks, Asher, for bringing some of these wonderful works to us.

Best regards,

Doug
 

Jerome Marot

Well-known member
I should say that the use of IR film, perhaps in negative for some pictures. is a very clever way to change the places to something eerily foreign. I visited Dachau (it is quite close to Munich where I live) and Buchenwald and the camps look rather like well-tend parks in their present state. This looks different.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Stunning photos (with an unusual technique) of a "situation" that is beyond "stunning" for its evil and horror.

Perhaps 30 years ago my late first wife, Bobbie, and I toured Europe, and were able to visit Auschwitz. After our visit to the camp, we went into the town and had lunch at a small cafe, dining al fresco. There was an older American couple seated at the next table, and we struck up a conversation. I mentioned that we had visited the camp. The fellow asked, "Did you get to Birkenau?" (Birkenau, sometimes spoken of as "Auschwitz II", was a "satellite" of the camp at Auschwitz.)

"No, we didn't", I said, but seeing the B- number tattooed on his arm, I said, "but I see you did." He in fact had been interned at Birkenau as a young boy, I think with his mother........
Doug,

Your touching story helps to add further vibrancy to the grip on self-worth that survivors somehow preserved against all odds. It also fleshes out the photographic documentation with the live voices that made it through that darkness!

Your positive meeting with him reaffirms my faith in the basic kindness of man.

Thanks for your most important affirmation and visit!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I should say that the use of IR film, perhaps in negative for some pictures. is a very clever way to change the places to something eerily foreign. I visited Dachau (it is quite close to Munich where I live) and Buchenwald and the camps look rather like well-tend parks in their present state. This looks different.
Jerome,

To me Dacheau is an example of the prettiest flowers by a Chruch cemetery.

[I certainly have no animus to Germany and refuse to place hatred in a locked box called the Nazi party. The latter was merely a fruit of culture: the cultivated European attitude towards Jews, Gypsies,the disabled, grotesquely deformed, the insane and homosexuals. There’s not the slightest evidence that Nazis were a “fruit” of anything but teachings standard throughout Europe. Just that Germany had the festering wounds of 0post World War I “Versailles treaty humiliation”, unemployment and political drifting. The spark to fascism just happened to occur earlier there at that unfortunate time. But history books written in 1920 already warned of its likely occurrence somewhere Europe.]

Dacheau is such a beautiful quaint and bespoke friendly almost “village” location with pastry shops that refuse to sell their cakes at lunchtime, so as not to compete with neighboring restaurants. No one would imagine that a short journey away, behind a long dark brick wall, lay one of the most notorious concentration camps we associate with Hitler’s shadow over Europe.

Folk there, at that time, claimed that they had no idea of what went on behind the walls. In fact, many ordinary citizens supplied the carts to schlepp bodies to the crematorium or supply the camp with provisions. So they “knew”, but froze their comprehension, framing instead a blind eye. That way they didn’t go mad.

I assign no blame to the German people for this as if not for the Wagner estate, a most generous support scholarship to write Mein Kampf from Henry Ford, data punch cards from IBM and the chances of history, this could have happened in France, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania or the U.K, anywhere that it was normal to regard Jews as almost non-persons and the hated killers of Christ.

Amazingly, the Lithuanians, Austrians, and even the French, only see themselves as victims and not remotely, (albeit in small limited extent), as eager and natural collaborators.

[After all, why didn’t the allies bomb the crematoria and gas-chambers? They had the knowledge and opportunity but hardly wanted the vermin of Europe themselves, as history now reveals!]

We must remember that, (before the design of even mobile gas chambers in vans), ordinary German Army recruits, tasked with shooting to death batches of assembled Jews in ditches, became traumatized. As a result, a sizable fraction were permanently disabled and could no longer function as soldiers for the Reich! So it’s likely that there was nothing inherently present in the souls of ordinary Germans in the Wehrmacht that was absent in the rest of Europe it came to dominate.

Asher
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
The Red Cross visiting inspectors seem to have been amply impressed at the show case “tour” the SS feted them with in Theresienstadt, occupied Czechoslovakia. They saw happy children playing soccer, theater and classical music recitals. So Jews were not being abused, after all as smuggled letters implied.


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Asher
 

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Hi, Asher,

. . .data punch cards from IBM. . .
It is interesting that one great-grandson of Herman Hollerith, generally credited with the development of the punched tabulating card and the associated machines, and the founder of one of the firms from which IBM was formed (Herman Hollerith IV), was a bishop of The Episcopal Church (now retired), and his brother ("Randy" Hollerith) is an Episcopal priest and currently the dean of the Washington National Cathedral.

Best regards,

Doug
 
Wow, Asher. These are incredible because we all know the history and we don't need bodies to be seen to remind us of the horror. Very emotional and touching.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Thanks Maggie for paying tribute to the work of this wonderful woman artist.

What is so outstanding is her simple technique and lack of animus.

We are all kind people. Hatred is something taught and which infests innocent children’s brains.

When we say “Don’t gyp me!” We might in the end contribute to a Roma woman being pushed into a canal.

When we say, “Faggot!” down the line a man will be dragged on a rope behind the truck of some hater.

When we say “nigger” another black youth will be shot by police and get away with it once more!

When we say “Yids don’t belong here!” a restaurant in France will explode!

We are part of the language of hate.

But ultimately religious leaders are mostly guilty and almost entirely of promoting hatred and xenophobia.

For certain, in the narrow confines of antisemitism, consider it’s been the official policy of the Catholic and all other Churches until the encyclical by Pope Paul VI of Nostre Aetate!
 
I grew up Catholic but am now not religious at all. That doesn't mean I don't care about others or have no sense of how to be kind etc., but I've seen too many
horrors in the name of religion. I don't understand why people are afraid of others with differences, be it race, religion, sexuality. Fear I suppose; of what? I'm not
sure. Xenophobes, Racists, Misogynists, homophobic, etc., etc., seems like a lack of education to me. You'd think people would learn from the past? Pictures like these
are not meant to blame but to make us feel something and realize how terrible the human race can be. There is no need to spell it out. Very sad. We should know better.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I grew up Catholic but am now not religious at all. That doesn't mean I don't care about others or have no sense of how to be kind etc., but I've seen too many
horrors in the name of religion. I don't understand why people are afraid of others with differences, be it race, religion, sexuality. Fear I suppose; of what? I'm not
sure. Xenophobes, Racists, Misogynists, homophobic, etc., etc., seems like a lack of education to me. You'd think people would learn from the past? Pictures like these
are not meant to blame but to make us feel something and realize how terrible the human race can be. There is no need to spell it out. Very sad. We should know better.
Well said, Maggie!

I don’t feel the malevolence is LACK of education, rather it is selfish, (i.e., exclusionary/elitist or nationalistic), education!

People were shown by example how to treat slaves. Disgust at others is taught!

If one uses ones natural abilities and inherent reflexes, one is sorry for the homeless and those who are treated cruelly!

It takes memes, infection of the brain with fixed ideas, that sweep through society so people really fear “the other”!

Churches with their talk of so called “good” versus so-called “evil” with imagined satanic forces, helps to feed this paranoia!

Absent that influence, people are more naturally generous, hospitable and protective of the stranger who comes in peace!

Asher
 
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