A successful photographer loses his wife after great anguish and decides he needs to make a pilgrimage to some Holocaust sites. He is a Jew, raised in the synagogue, but more recently he is as close to the Native Americans of New Mexico as he is to the rabbis he knows. He gets a Polish friend to devise three itineraries to Polish and German concentration camps. His health is fragile. During his wife’s illness he had a stroke. But he’s determined to walk these places of mass sacrifice. He can’t say why. He doesn’t want to. He is an artist used to waiting for his subjects to reveal themselves, not imposing his ideas on them.
Steven Katzman has always photographed the energy he finds in groups—tent meetings, street gangs, hospital attendants, Oneidas in Wisconsin, Blacks in their Sarasota, Florida neighborhood, prison lifers, prison rodeo cowboys, boxers at the gym—he’s extremely gregarious. It was easy for him to develop a special friendship with the ailing Mohammad Ali.
In the extermination camps he meets the phantoms of the millions sacrificed during the worst mass extinction in centuries. He quickly learns that these shades still abide where their spirits left their bodies. Standing at the front gate of Auschwitz he feels their presence instantly.
He shoots piles of hair and shoes, railroad cars, empty barracks, ovens, dissection rooms, stupid tourists making forbidden selfies in the yards where victims died from gunshot.
After three years, having covered more than all the camps on his lists, he returns home with his pictures, and soon suffers a heart attack and a second stroke. He hadn’t prepared for the weight of what these trips would force his soul to carry.
And the pictures . . .
In a strange revelation that often happens to people who work entirely by instinct, he decided that his grief, that grief itself, had to look differently than it looked in the work of other photographers and filmmakers who had wandered the camps before him. He thought of a Hebrew prayer he’d been assigned to read during his bar mitzvah, called Zichronot –God is watching. It didn’t come to him immediately. What drove him as he printed, almost without knowing it, was a vow not to describe, or condemn, but to make his pictures so large that they would seem to unfurl translucent overlays of color and embrace his viewers with light-filled heavenly mercy.
It was a risk. But it’s exactly what we look to artists to do.
He didn’t want the pictures to say NEVER AGAIN, the promise always applied to the Holocaust. The phrase feels over-used because since the Holocaust, the world keeps adding to the atrocities with nothing to stop them but feckless “thoughts and prayers.” Steven’s pictures lead his viewers in another direction.
Classic black and white, the documentarian’s tool, went out the window. He wasn’t recording or pointing a finger. Color was all. He would celebrate transcendence, sumptuously, the way the blue stained-glass windows of Chartres shower their cavernous nave with uncanny light of mystical sacrifice and salvation.
His images are sandwiches of transparent color, layering crematoria, cells, and barracks with old pictures of his own family, landscapes, railroad cars, the drawings of doomed Jewish children with Bing Crosby or Fred Astaire and other popular USO entertainers joking by the ovens as the spirits of dead Jews appear magically through the walls. Sacrilege? Oddly, the effect deepens our sense of tragedy.
Turning over the images one by one, the heart beats faster. The beauty of each page is so unexpected. The irony is a lump in the throat.
When Steven asked me to write about this project. He hadn’t finished the pictures. I have written about how artists think and work for over 55 years, but I’d never heard of him before. He was audacious, complex. He needed a biography. So I wrote one. It accompanies the pictures in this project.
All this occurred during the worst years of the Covid pandemic. We sat for hours, masked, outside, in comfortable easy chairs in Santa Fe. Gradually I pulled the thread of his life out of him for him to see. There were times when he wept. So did I.