by Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Henryk Ross (1910–1991) worked as a photographer for the Polish press before World War II began. Born in Warsaw, he was living in Lodz in 1940 when the Nazis confined all Jews to the ghetto. In the Lodz Ghetto, Ross was made a photographer for the Jewish Administration’s Statistics Department, which required him to produce propaganda images. His documentation reveals the everyday life and struggle of a community under incomprehensible circumstances. Although Ross was forbidden to take unofficial photographs, he often did so, risking his life to record the horrors of ghetto life. Ross’ images taken in secret and his later efforts to disseminate them represent an act of protest and of preservation of his lived experience, and that of so many others. He captured searing images of the trauma of the Holocaust, including painful moments of separation and deportations. The pictures – some harrowing – powerfully bear witness to their time, while preserving important memories of our collective history. His work could be called, in today’s terms, a form of “citizen journalism.” Although he was a trained photojournalist, his documentation of the grim reality of life in the ghetto was not part of his mandate, and was often a surreptitious act of resistance and civic duty.
Toward the end of World War II, Ross placed his 35mm cellulose nitrate negatives and prints in iron jars, which he buried in an iron-rimmed box in the ghetto for safe-keeping. After the liberation of the ghetto by the Russian Red Army, he dug up his negatives to find that many of them were severely damaged by groundwater.
An exceptional group of 48 gelatin-silver prints by Ross – recently donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) by collector and gallery dealer Howard Greenberg – had been kept in an envelope in the possession of Internment Camp and Holocaust survivor Lova Szmuszkowicz, later Leon Sutton (1909 – 2007), from 1945 to 2007. After the war, Sutton received the prints directly from Ross and brought them to New York City in 1947 when he immigrated to the U.S. Sutton’s son, Paul Sutton, inherited them from his father, and discovered their importance when he saw the MFA’s presentation of the “Memory Unearthed” exhibition in 2017. These photographs are the first by Ross to enter the MFA’s collection and among the rare few owned by a U.S. museum. They tell stories of suffering and resilience and the trajectory of these specific, rare, prints tell the story of emigration from Europe following World War II. Now part of the MFA’s holdings, these extraordinary images will permanently preserve this visual record of brutal injustices, ensuring that the traumas of war are not forgotten.
An exceptional group of 48 gelatin-silver prints by Ross – recently donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) by collector and gallery dealer Howard Greenberg – had been kept in an envelope in the possession of Internment Camp and Holocaust survivor Lova Szmuszkowicz, later Leon Sutton (1909 – 2007), from 1945 to 2007. After the war, Sutton received the prints directly from Ross and brought them to New York City in 1947 when he immigrated to the U.S. Sutton’s son, Paul Sutton, inherited them from his father, and discovered their importance when he saw the MFA’s presentation of the “Memory Unearthed” exhibition in 2017. These photographs are the first by Ross to enter the MFA’s collection and among the rare few owned by a U.S. museum. They tell stories of suffering and resilience and the trajectory of these specific, rare, prints tell the story of emigration from Europe following World War II. Now part of the MFA’s holdings, these extraordinary images will permanently preserve this visual record of brutal injustices, ensuring that the traumas of war are not forgotten.
Interview with Paul Sutton
Truth in Photography: When did you first see the photographs?
Paul Sutton: I can't pinpoint it exactly. I was aware of them, but to be honest, the gravity of what we had wasn't evident. My parents were very forward looking. So, they didn't discuss a lot of stories from back then. Even my father hardly told stories. Even though he had the photographs, it wasn't like he was showing them around. When he passed, and when my mother passed, the photographs were in my parents’ belongings. I obviously realized that there's something here that was important, and my father's handwritten, personal note about how he got them really struck me. I had them in my desk drawer, because I wanted them not to get lost. I think it was the time the MFA exhibit was happening, there were articles in The New York Times, that all of a sudden the dots came together. TiP: Did they talk to you about the holocaust as a child? Sutton: Very little. A small anecdote would come up. My parents spoke Polish to each other, but my brother, my only sibling, and I never learned Polish, and it was intentional on my parents’ part, because they wanted to leave Poland behind. They had a very large group of survivors in New York City, a very tight group of people from Lodz. But they didn't talk in detail about things. I know my mother's brother was killed in the ghetto uprising in Warsaw. I know circumstances about my father's brothers and my mother's sisters, but they didn't really tell detailed stories of life in the ghetto, or especially in the camps. I guess my mother was more in a factory, than a camp. My father was in Auschwitz. It's not something you press your parents about. “Tell me more, tell me more.” They want to move forward. They're not dwelling on it. TiP: What do you think is the importance of bringing forth images of the holocaust today? Sutton: It's hard for me to look at it in the context on its own, without looking at today's political world and other types of racism and discrimination and such. The importance becomes, to me, that first of all, this kind of discrimination, whether it's today against Asians, black and white discrimination, it's not new. |
It’s even that much more important, to me, to say this is not new. Unless we never forget what's happened before, we will continue to allow these types of atrocities to happen. There are probably atrocities around the world that don't get the same kind of attention, and I think that the importance is to keep those memories alive. People really suffer. I'm Jewish, my parents were survivors. I look at it from a broader lens, even. There's a lot of tragedy around the world. It's not like one tragedy is worse, or more important than somebody else's tragedy, but we have to look at and remember everybody's tragedy. I don't know how people can inflict these kinds of situations on other people. What's scary is what's happening in the United States. Whether it's racially biased pride, everybody's got their political spin on it. As human beings, we continue to do this to each other. It’s really powerful to say, it's happening now, it's been happening for a long time. Are we ever going to get beyond this, or is that how the human race treats each other? I don't pretend to have an answer, but I think the importance is that these kinds of things can keep reinforcing what kinds of values can happen in the world. Plus, they're a memorial to the people who suffered.
TiP: Where do you think the truth in photography lies? Is there a truth to these pictures, and how does that reveal itself?
Sutton: I think that viewing the images creates a truth. Ultimately, people's truth is whatever they see and what their emotion is. So, the truth in these images is in emotion. I'm sure that lynching picture is not set up. Somebody actually got lynched. People boarded trains and got deported, and were killed. That's a truth, right? But that secondary truth from the image, the image provides you with an instance. I do sports photography. I've been to a lot of Olympics. You have Carl Lewis at the finish line, crossing, or Usain Bolt, and they throw their arms up, and you capture that moment as a still. And then, when I see the T.V. footage of it, you hardly see that moment, because it goes by so quickly. So, the power of the still photograph is that you locked in that moment, and you get to linger on it...and that's your truth, because then you look at the facial expression, the arms position, and that becomes your reality. I don't know what reality is beyond that. Everybody has a different reality. You can go to Civil War pictures, you can go to Cornell Capa, you can go to the planting of the flag at Iwo Jima, and people say it was recreated. But the emotion of the people planting the flag, who were there, that's real. Was it a real moment? Is it historically correct? That could be debated, but it doesn't take away from the “truth.” The truth, to me, is the emotion. How do I feel about the pictures? I can't look at my father's pictures and disassociate my parents' experience. I can't disassociate from knowing that in 1949 my mother came to the United States. She was born in 1923, she was barely 30, but she lived to 90. She lived a whole life in the United States that was separate from that experience. That wasn't her only life. I had a really great relationship with my parents, which sometimes I tell people and they think I'm crazy. Who has a great relationship with their parents? But, that was because they went forward. Their truth is, we survived, so we need to take advantage that we survived and have a life. And they did.
Sutton: I think that viewing the images creates a truth. Ultimately, people's truth is whatever they see and what their emotion is. So, the truth in these images is in emotion. I'm sure that lynching picture is not set up. Somebody actually got lynched. People boarded trains and got deported, and were killed. That's a truth, right? But that secondary truth from the image, the image provides you with an instance. I do sports photography. I've been to a lot of Olympics. You have Carl Lewis at the finish line, crossing, or Usain Bolt, and they throw their arms up, and you capture that moment as a still. And then, when I see the T.V. footage of it, you hardly see that moment, because it goes by so quickly. So, the power of the still photograph is that you locked in that moment, and you get to linger on it...and that's your truth, because then you look at the facial expression, the arms position, and that becomes your reality. I don't know what reality is beyond that. Everybody has a different reality. You can go to Civil War pictures, you can go to Cornell Capa, you can go to the planting of the flag at Iwo Jima, and people say it was recreated. But the emotion of the people planting the flag, who were there, that's real. Was it a real moment? Is it historically correct? That could be debated, but it doesn't take away from the “truth.” The truth, to me, is the emotion. How do I feel about the pictures? I can't look at my father's pictures and disassociate my parents' experience. I can't disassociate from knowing that in 1949 my mother came to the United States. She was born in 1923, she was barely 30, but she lived to 90. She lived a whole life in the United States that was separate from that experience. That wasn't her only life. I had a really great relationship with my parents, which sometimes I tell people and they think I'm crazy. Who has a great relationship with their parents? But, that was because they went forward. Their truth is, we survived, so we need to take advantage that we survived and have a life. And they did.
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