Saturday, April 11, 2015

The Photography of Sadness

This morning I look at the picture of Julia Pirotte (1907-2000), her self-portrait taken in 1942. It moves me. I return often to her sad reflectiveness, the camera there as her eye, an eye that both protects her from and opens her to the world. She is already vulnerable, quietly internal, and, simultaneously, so entirely immersed in and made of and by the world. This is during the war. She has seen so much, maybe too much, more than a human should see. Should we be forced to look? Charlotte Delbo’s words haunt me: look, just try to see. It’s impossible. Truly impossible to look. Yet, Julia trains her camera. She trains it on herself. She cannot look directly into the mirror. The camera is her eye. It becomes her way of seeing, meditated through technology, imprinted like a tattoo, the image, the moment of life on her eye. She chose photography, or it chose her.

She wrote in an essay, “I like sadness: it’s more photogenic than joy.” She knows sadness more than joy; it’s strangely familiar to her. She lost her brother to typhus in a Gulag camp, her sister was guillotined by Gestapo in Breslau (1944), her father and stepmother were murdered in death camps, and her first husband, mobilized in the war, she never again saw. Her mother had died when Julia was nine. She came from small town in Poland, between Lublin and Warsaw, called Końskowola

In post-war Poland she formed the WAF, the Military Photographic Agency. She was sent by the agency to document the Kielce pogrom in July 1946. Many of her photos of that event the police confiscated and destroyed. There are some remaining and I have a collection of those photos in Julia Pirotte: Faces and Hands, as well as in Jan Gross’s book, Fear, where I first discovered Pirotte’s work and felt compelled by this Polish-Jewish woman’s war photos. 

She called the camera a potential weapon—as she learned when used in the wrong circumstances and others, also in the midst of war, felt threatened and exposed by the camera’s eye. After that, she turned it into an “instrument of struggle.” In 1934 she had left Poland for Brussels. She was a Communist, involved in worker issues, photographing strikes, working for small news agencies, an active member of the Resistance in Brussels and France. Three decades after the war when she visited her former Polish village, she saw her house but did not knock. She recognized the climate that had developed through and after the war towards Jews, their families mostly dead, their properties confiscated and moved into by Polish families. She had remembered the violence to her camera. What was once was no longer. Julia lived with that loss, cloaked in grief.

Many museum artifacts of Second World War and Jewish history in Poland come from those people who donated items and collections. So much was destroyed in Poland in the wars and through communism, disappeared, taken. What remains, the collections of historical documents, maps, photos at historical institutes, the camps, the various small museums in former synagogues, has been assembled and opened to the public painstakingly and after much work of collection, personal donation, and time passed where history comes to meet the present and when some will come to see and partake of its remnants. Poland is now beginning to claim and create a history disallowed, silenced under the regimes it endured through communism. The work of historical institutes is often retrospective in character. Whereas the work of museums such as the Warsaw Uprising Museum, opened in 2004, is technologically interactive and experiential in character. For Pirotte, there was a box: press clippings, photos, folk songs in Yiddish, poems by Jewish poets in Polish translations (all of them about the Holocaust)—“carefully selected and something about you you’d rather not disclose. . . .Besides her photographs, this folder with poems is the most personal testimony [she] left behind," as poet Krystyna Dabrowska writes in Julia Pirotte: Faces and Hands.

Why are you interested in Pirotte?, Maciek, our guide through Poland, asks me at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw where I purchase a book of some her photos. I hear myself saying, “She is a woman and a photographer. I feel compelled by her work.” Still, I’m unsure how I’m drawn to her during my time in Poland, just that I am, and that she has stories to tell through her work and hidden behind her photos and I want to know. I’m hungry, I’ve always been hungry and my diet in childhood of these things, these histories was lean. I’m seeking now, looking, listening, attentive and attuned. I’m quiet in the hallways of museums. I want introspection, space, and solitude. I find myself alone again and again, as often as possible, in Poland. The late afternoons stretch toward evenings. In small spaces I enter into other times and places that exist here, now, that return quietly, in pieces, never whole, with attention and stillness. These moments, lives, histories, tracings are all around us. We must look for them and stay with them for a while, let them linger, penetrate and change us, when and where they find us.