Buried Treasure

The great responsibility of the photographer to record life is more than evident in the work left behind by Holocaust survivor Henryk Ross, whose Lodz Ghetto Album: Clandestine Photographs of Ghetto Life goes on display today in the Mizel Center for Arts & Culture's Singer Gallery. Shot on the sly by Ross, a Lodz denizen who buried the negatives of his clandestine legacy when the Polish ghetto was liquidated in 1944, the exhibit offers an everyday view of ghetto life that's rarely seen in Holocaust imagery.

"Alternately devastating, challenging and unspeakably poignant, these pictures...reverberate in our being as the felt, lived experience of the people whose lives are captured in them," writes gallery director Simon Zalkind of the collection. More haunting still is the fact that Ross survived to dig them up after the war: Ninety-five percent of his ghetto-mates, who were shipped to Auschwitz, didn't make it.

Lodz Ghetto Album opens tonight with a reception at 5:30 p.m. (a lecture follows at 8) and continues through June 15 at the Mizel, 350 South Dahlia Street; for information, go to www.maccjcc.org or call 303-316-6360.
April 24-June 15, 2008