New England Portfolio Review: Beth Burstein: 82598
Today, we are continuing to look at the work of artists with whom I met at this year’s New England Portfolio Review, hosted by the Griffin Museum and the Photographic Resource Center. Up next is Beth Burstein.
Beth Burstein is a photographer in the New York City metro area whose work currently focuses on documenting what has vanished or is destined to be destroyed. Her projects stem from her family history and her own experiences, and her desire to tell these stories which she feels hold a universal connection.
Beth has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, internationally, and online, including a 2024 group exhibition sponsored by the NJ Council on the Arts at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ, a 2023 one-woman exhibit at the SRO Photo Gallery of Texas Tech University, and a group show at the 2016 Berlin Photo Biennale. Her projects have recently been published in ARTDOC Magazine, FRAMES Magazine, and Float Magazine. She was awarded 1st place in the Self Portraiture category and Runner Up in Documentary/Editorial category of the 9th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Awards.
Beth received a BA in Photography from Hampshire College in 1982, where she studied under Elaine Mayes and Jerry Leibling.
Currently, Beth’s images, Postcard from My Grandfather, are currently on display in an exhibit titled, “Exploring Our Connections at the Montclair Art Museum (sponsored by the NJ State Council on the Arts).
82598
“82598” is an ongoing photo series I began in 1997 when I first began to explore the experience of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, or “Second Generation.” The experience of being ”2G” is something that has evolved and changed as I have gotten older. What began in my 20’s and 30’s with feelings of grief and longing, now has become an increased sense of urgency to tell my family’s story to ensure this part of our history is neither silenced nor denied, especially in the face of growing antisemitism worldwide.
This project, now it its 27th year, began with a series of photographs of my father’s uniform which he saved after his liberation from a subcamp of Dachau. He held onto the uniform, which bears his identification number 82598, after liberation and then kept it in a bag on his closet shelf for many years. I had known about it from an early age, and it became my connection to a past that at the time felt unreal. When I knew his uniform was going on loan to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC in the late 1990’s, I wanted to photograph it before it left. While photographing, it struck me that it was quite small, something I had never noticed. It was not sized for the adult I knew my father to be, but for a child or a teenager, someone my height. Without thinking, I tried it on and it fit me perfectly. This was when it sank in that my father was just a slight boy of 15 when he was forced to wear this uniform.
Recently, I created three images using the few family photographs my grandfather managed to save and keep hidden throughout the time they were in forced labor at the concentration camp. After the war my grandfather had them made into photo-postcards to send to relatives in the United States, and they were eventually given to my father after he emigrated to the U.S. I have looked at those images of my father’s family, with my grandfather’s written, heartbreaking messages on the reverse sides hundreds of times since I was a little girl. These, too, serve as my connection to people and a place that have felt inaccessible to me.
In these images I have placed my grandfather’s handwritten message on the front of each postcard as if it is bleeding through from the back side, making it necessary for the viewer to carefully read what is written on each card and uncover the jarring, tragic message each one reveals.
The second half of this “Legacy” project is my photo essay “I Thought It Would Feel Like Home,” which documents a 2005 pilgrimage I made with a small group of cousins to my father’s pre-Holocaust homeland of Lithuania. It combines my photographs from that journey with excerpts from journal entries written while I was there, with historical information about the Lithuanian Jews and their fate.
In documenting and writing about that journey I came face-to-face with the profound loss of a culture and its people, their erasure at the hands of others, and the “memories of memory” that are the only remnants I have to hold onto.
Daniel George: Would you share more about the beginnings of 82598? It has been in the works for a while. How has it evolved with you over time?
Beth Burstein: The project began in 1997 when my father asked my brother and me how we felt about loaning his concentration camp uniform to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Up until then it had been stored in his clothing closet for years. He knew it was an important family artifact and that I had an unusual relationship with it because it was one of the only tangible things to connect me to my family history. I knew it was important to let it go to the museum and help educate visitors about the Holocaust, but it became an emotional decision for me, and I was on the fence about letting it go at first.
Having concentrated in documentary photography at college and being inclined to tell a story about my subject matter, I decided to photograph the uniform as a way to hold onto it and remember it, and also share it by letting others see it. I was also aware that I was in the very rare position of owning and having contact with this well-preserved uniform, and that was not lost on me. So, before it left, I created the self-portrait of myself in the unform and the close-up still lives of it. I was 36 years old at the time.
Over the years, as my relationship to my Holocaust legacy evolved and changed (it never really leaves you – it’s always there in the background) I still felt a need to create imagery about it. I went on to create the “Hand Me Down” image of the uniform in my own clothing closet, then the photo essay on my pilgrimage to my father’s homeland of Lithuania and the absence of its once vibrant Jewish community, and most recently the “Postcards from My Grandfather” images.
DG: In your artist statement, you mention your first experience trying on this uniform and the emotional effect it had on you—bringing a deeper recognition of your father’s experience. I feel that this exemplifies the significance of this work and how photography can permit us to figuratively ‘try on’ experiences or histories that are not our own. Perhaps this allows us to have some sort of deeper emotional connection. I don’t really know how to make a question out of this, but maybe I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the topic.
BB: I think you’re so right about photography permitting us to figuratively “try on” experiences or histories that are not our own. What immediately comes to mind when I think about that is the first time seeing the work of Walker Evans, the photos of the WPA, Matthew Brady’s graphic post-battle photos of the Civil War (which still astonish me), Robert Frank’s “The Americans”, and the work of Zanele Muholi that I recently saw when I was in SF earlier this year. I think photographs succeed in doing that when they make us pause and want to know more about what we are viewing.
I grew up reading Life Magazine, Time and Newsweek, and my parents had the “Family of Man” photobook which I always looked through…. these were windows onto new worlds for me.
I’m concerned, however, that we really can’t trust the images we now see in the news, or on social media, because it is so easy to manipulate them in post-production or with AI. It’s become easier for us to be manipulated into experiencing things that have been altered or completely fabricated.
DG: I’d like to know more about your choice to put these negatives away for many years after making the images. I can make assumptions as to why you did this, but I would rather hear it from you. What led you to reconnect with them and reinitiate this work so many years later?
BB: To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what motivated me to put away the film after I shot the first images of this project (which are my self-portrait in the uniform and the close-up still lives of it.) I shot them right before moving to the SF Bay Area for a while, and I sense the upheaval of a big cross-country move had something to do with that. But I think there is a deeper reason and that is that I did not have a photo community at that point, and I did this project in a bit of a bubble at first. I had put my cameras down about ten years before then and wasn’t photographing much at all up to that point. Yet when I knew the uniform was going on its journey to the USHMM, I took out my old film cameras, which were my beloved Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex and a Nikon FM, loaded them with chrome film, and it all came back to me so naturally to photograph again.
I should also acknowledge that at that time I didn’t know other children of survivors closely as I do now, and I think it was a part of my life I compartmentalized and kept separate from the rest of my life. How fitting is it that I took all that developed chrome film, carefully put it in archival film pages and then into an old Kodak photo paper box, where they stayed in a closet for years? In hindsight, I wish I had proceeded differently, but it has all worked out in the end and they are now out in public.
After I self-published a book that includes both parts of this project (82598 and I Thought It Would Feel Like Home) in 2013, and did various exhibits and talks about it, I felt it was time for me to move on to other work. However, recently I’ve felt a need to revisit it and add to it because of the recent rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and the disturbing lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in younger generations. (I’d like to acknowledge Shana Lopes, Assistant Curator of Photography at SFMOMA who, upon seeing my project earlier this year at the New England Portfolio Review, and knowing I wanted to change its title because the old one no longer felt right to me, suggested “82598”. It was perfect. She understood the significance of that number. Those numbered patches sewn onto concentration camp uniforms were the only identity the prisoners had at that point – the Nazis had stripped them of their personhood and independence when they entered the camps.)
DG: In your related project, I Thought it Would Feel Like Home, you went on a pilgrimage to your father’s pre-Holocaust homeland of Lithuania. What led you to this component of the larger Legacy project? What do you feel it contributes to the narrative?
BB: In 2005 my cousin from Chicago invited me to join him and several other cousins, some of whom I had never met, to travel to Lithuania where my father was born and raised (until 1944 when, at the age of 15, he and his family were taken to camps in Germany.)
To me Lithuania had always felt like a far off, inaccessible place. In truth, it really kind of was until 1991 when it gained its independence from the Soviet Union. Still, although it was only a plane ride away, I felt very little connection to it.
That changed when we travelled there and toured the cities of Vilnius and Kaunas (my father’s home), and nearby villages that year. It was a life changing journey for me and helped me feel a connection to a place and history I had never felt.
I took hundreds of photographs during that weeklong visit, with my first DSLR camera, a Canon EOS 20D. I purchased it just weeks before and barely knew how to use. I had to read its owner’s manual during the plane ride over there! I had no plans for a project or photo essay at that point, and only knew I wanted to record our journey.
My tendency was, as I mentioned earlier, to tell a story with my photographs since my background was social documentary photography. I naturally fell back into that mode once I began taking pictures in Lithuania. I didn’t realize until I returned home and began going through my images and journal entries that I had a story to tell about my family, my experience of being Second Generation, and the fate of Lithuania’s very large and culturally rich Jewish population (it had been called the Jerusalem of Europe before the war.) That population had been all but wiped out by the Nazi’s and their Lithuanian collaborators during WWII. With this new photo essay about our journey there, and what I discovered about my family and myself, I could create a personal and perhaps more relatable window onto what is traditionally taught about the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust. I think the gravity of that is not easy to fully grasp when one learns about it for the first time in middle school or high school, and hopefully this photo essay could add to that story in a way the “82598” photos could not.
DG: In our email correspondence about this work, you wrote about the importance of “personal testimony.” I think this is what made these photographs stick in my mind—just how close you were to the Holocaust. Tangible evidence could literally be found in your closet. Would you talk more about the importance of seeing and talking about these things, particularly at this moment in time?
BB: I do feel it’s important to hear personal testimonies about events in history by the people who experienced them or witnessed them because they make the events more relatable for us, more human. Having tangible evidence, in the form of artifacts or photographs, make them even more real for us, and believable. Let’s face it, most people get their information online now, especially through social media. How much of it is truthful? Hearing about historical events in person from those who lived through them or witnessed them is extremely powerful and believable.
I was born in 1961 which was quite close to the end of WWII and the Holocaust. Those events were still fresh in people’s memories, and I had never heard them being questioned or, worse, denied. I grew up thinking “Never Again” really meant never again. How could those horrible atrocities ever be repeated? And yet, here we are today – the Holocaust is in fact being denied, or minimized, or even glorified by some. The antisemitic jargon my father says he heard growing up in wartime Europe and in the camps is being repeated, and unbelievably and unfathomably, Hitler is being idolized publicly by some people today.
Currently I believe only twenty states have mandatory Holocaust education in their schools. It’s no wonder there is now such ignorance about that time in history. I find this especially disturbing because if one has no knowledge about these kinds of historical events, history can indeed repeat itself.
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