CEPA’s Holocaust exhibition: ‘I wanted to make the absence present’

In CEPA’s second-floor space, 600 more of the haunting images are shown in “Ghosts Boxcar #3,” in a replica wooden box car used to take Jews to the concentration camps. Peek inside, out of public view, and there are yet more faces, bringing memory to those otherwise forgotten.

It took Hirsch, co-curator with Ruby Merritt of CEPA’s ambitious new art exhibition, “The Power of Resilience and Hope – Photography and the Holocaust: Then & Now,” decades to decide how to respond meaningfully as a Jewish artist to that period, and many years after that to bring his powerful photomontage to completion.

Ninety percent of his family members from that time were murdered in the Holocaust.

“These pictures came from passports, I.D. pictures made by the Nazis and family snapshots, and I wanted to do something to express my feelings of loss,” said the 74-year-old Hirsch, CEPA’s executive director from 1993 to 1999. “This was about absence, and I wanted to make the absence present.”

To do that, Hirsch re-photographed all of the images using an extreme close-up lens, with limited depth of field, to bring the essence of each picture into sharp focus, he said. The rest of the image intentionally fades into the background, representing the curtailing of their lives. The box car was accurately re-created.

Hirsch is one of 30 contemporary, regional and international artists, some of whom are not Jewish, represented in the two-part show at the downtown Market Arcade Complex, 617 Main St.

The second installation will begin March 23 and close May 31. Small exhibits are also in satellite locations: Western New York Book Arts Center, 468 Washington St., as well as by appointment only at Mirabo Press, 11 Botsford Place (email [email protected]). A 122-page exhibition catalog accompanies the…