Marked For Life

I experience the world as though I am watching a movie. Black and white fades into color; people pass by in slow motion; lighting sets the scene. It has always been this way for me. When people tell me a story, I don’t just listen—I watch it unfold vividly in my mind.

In 1997, in Prague, I encountered my first Holocaust survivors. I was unprepared for the images that would surface as a ninety-year-old woman recounted her memories. As I photographed her, the past and the present collided before my eyes and through my lens, merging into a cinematic experience that was both visceral and unsettling.

My photographic project is entitled Marked For Life. The title refers to the fact that those prisoners tattooed in Auschwitz were selected to live slightly longer and were forced into roles that made them witnesses—and unwilling participants—in the machinery of death. These experiences marked them permanently, both literally and figuratively. Since 1997, I have photographed numerous Holocaust survivors in Northern California, New York, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Not all are survivors of Auschwitz, but all have been marked for life.

Two years later, when a local bus dropped me off at the Majdanek death camp in Lublin, Poland, nothing could have prepared me for what I encountered. It felt as though I were standing on a film set, viewing the scene through a camera lens—complete with a wide pan across a macabre landscape. What struck me most was a darkness I had never before seen or felt with such intensity. The immense scale and precise layout of the camp stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated by the blackened buildings and crematorium chimneys. Seeing “the chimneys” in person carried a stark realism that no image had prepared me for. It was like a horror film stripped of its soundtrack, replaced instead by an eerie, oppressive silence.

Movies have dulled my responses to real horror making it a struggle to distinguish between lived reality and its cinematic echo. This body of work confronts that tension. It represents real people who have endured something nearly incomprehensible and survived, yet their stories are filtered through the visual language of cinema. The work explores how places evoke memory, how trauma produces numbness, and how film’s realism can mirror the way these elements converge.

Having been influenced by movies for most of my life, listening to Holocaust survivors recount their memories led me to experience their stories as intense short films—moving between black and white and color. Through cinematic sequencing in my visual narratives, I use the look of film stills as a vessel for containing these memories. I work with large-scale prints to confront viewers with the magnitude of the survivors’ experiences, to convey emotional intensity, and to reinforce the sense that these memories—and my experience of them—are larger than life.

Traumatic memories, I’ve learned, are burned into the psyche and return to consciousness of their own accord. In cinematic theory, the persistence of vision refers to the retina’s ability to retain an image briefly after it disappears. Even when we close our eyes, traces of what we have seen remain. For Holocaust survivors, the boundary between memory and the present is permeable. Images are so deeply imprinted that traumatic memory functions like a series of short films replaying themselves—fragmented, recurring, and alive with their own force.

Marked For Life visually suggests the simultaneous overlap of past and present that exists for each survivor. This work has compelled me to explore how trauma shapes the human spirit—and how, despite everything, a spark remains: a quiet luminosity that still emerges.