Outside the Lines exhibition on view at Minnesota JCC in Spring 2023

Indifference

Created in 2017 for the Sabes JCC partnership with University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies [Re]Telling exhibition, the project featured paintings by Holocaust survivor Fritz Hirschberger and challenged Twin Cities artists to “[Re]Tell” his narrative in our medium thereby extending Holocaust history and memory across generations.

This photographic image was created in response to Hirschberger’s painting also titled Indifference, which he based on a photograph of an older woman walking to the gas chamber with young children in her care. That source image is one of 193 Nazi photographs that comprise the Auschwitz Album that documents the arrival, selection, and processing of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May/June of 1944.

The Auschwitz Album is both chaotic and orderly. Jews are moving – getting off trains, walking to the gas chambers. They are static – standing in long lines, waiting, being inspected. Smoke from the crematorium is in the background. Barbed wire is ever present. Despite being taken on sunny days, the images are dark and sorrowful.

Jews are pictured in large groups, yet Hirschberger selected an image of a solitary experience – a single woman and her charges. Hirschberger reminds us that while the Holocaust was a crime against all Jews, it was individuals who were murdered.

Hirschberger includes Edward Yashinski’s poetic and profound words painted into the barbed wire, telling us that the guilty include those who knew but did nothing. Indifference is the barbed wire that enables betrayal and killing.

“Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you. Fear not your friends, for they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit killers and betrayers to walk safely on earth.” - Edward Yashinski

In the face of hate language, we turn away. We don’t speak out for fear of offending or reprisal. How do we find the courage not to be indifferent?

This photographic image was created completely in-camera, in one exposure, without Photoshop effects.  It is simultaneously moving and static - chaotic and orderly. We move fluidly between the roles of sufferer, betrayer, killer and being the true evil, the enabler - the indifferent.

Who are you?

Original Activist

The project is a collaboration with Minnesota Lynx/WNBA legend Candice Wiggins and is something quite different than our usual team related photography. The Lynx having won their first WNBA Championship the previous season (2011), Candice wanted to explore her feelings about the championship within the context of her relationship to black feminism, the Black Power movement and Blaxploitation films.

Her folder of inspiration images comprised of iconic photographs and resonated with me for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is they were the types of images that sparked my own interest in photography in the first place. Collaborating with her off the court brought about these beautiful images and gave me the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of a significant occurrence of my youth in the 1960s and 70s.

In these images, Candice takes on the persona of Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Sundiata Acoli and Pam Grier as a means of deepening her own self-awareness and growth as an activist. For me, the themes explore questions about how we understand and react to people who think, act and are different from us. What would we learn about ourselves if we took on the persona of our heroes?  What if we took on the persona of Candice’s heroes?

This is a selection of images from the series created in collaboration with Candice Wiggins in 2012 with creative direction from Rebecca Longawa. You can read Candice Wiggins’ reflection on this project in her own words here: https://www.candicewiggins.com/squares-stay-sharp/original-activist

Transfer of Memory

Transfer of Memory is a traveling exhibit created by David in collaboration with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The original exhibit featured full color digital photographs of each Holocaust survivor. During his sessions, David also created portraits in black and white using a Holga film camera. These works were presented publicly in the Outside the LInes exhibition for the first time.

THROUGH MY LENS, THEY LET ME INTO THEIR LIVES

My interest in making portraits of Holocaust survivors existed before I became a photographer. As a 10-year-old, I recall the monument dedication memorializing the six million in my hometown of Sioux City, Iowa. I couldn’t comprehend the crowd’s deep sadness, but witnessing their raw emotion sparked my curiosity to better understand the Holocaust. Years later, realizing our limited time with this shrinking population, the idea to photograph survivors became my personal passion.

The creation of Transfer of Memory elevated my vision, and led to one of the most meaningful, humbling, and holy experiences – and some of my proudest life’s work.

As a Jew born in the 1950s without direct family ties to what had happened, it gnawed at me that my connection to the Holocaust was primarily academic. That changed when I met my mother-in-law of blessed memory, Gerda Fishman z’l’, who escaped Germany at age 10. While I never photographed her for this project, she was my dearest inspiration and teacher.

As a child, she witnessed a crowd break into her family’s dry goods store during Kristallnacht, destroying everything. Thanks to her father’s intuition, her family escaped, first fleeing to Holland, and finally settling in the United States. Tragically, her grandparents, without VISAs, were left behind and murdered in Auschwitz.

Gerda’s family eventually moved to Minneapolis, where she grew up, married, and raised a family. Her amazing survivorship, intertwined with scarring memories, remained core to her identity and continues to be part of our family story to carry forward. I am blessed with the life and family I have with my wife, Julie, because of Gerda’s father’s courageous foresight to escape Germany.

The survivors I photographed for Transfer of Memory teach that Holocaust survival is much more than one story or memory – it’s comprised of millions of individual testimonies. We learned so much from each of them during each portrait session, including a lesson in holiness. They all openly welcomed us into what felt like a Makom Kadosh, מקום קודש, a holy place, upon entering their homes.

This text is an excerpt from the introduction of a new book released in 2023, featuring the original Transfer of Memory portraits.