Lodz Ghetto Album

Born in 1913, Henryk Ross was a press photographer in Poland before World War II. As a Jew, he was incarcerated by the invading Germans in the Lodz Ghetto (Poland's largest ghetto after Warsaw) where he became one of two official photographers, producing identity and propaganda photographs for its Department of Statistics. His duties afforded him access to film and processing facilities, and he used these to create a unique record of ghetto life, secretly photographing the atrocities of Lodz and making family and group portraits of (and presumably for) the ghetto elite. As the Germans began the liquidation of Lodz in 1944, he buried his archive of 3,000 negatives. Surviving the Holocaust, he was able to recover them after the war. From his post-war home in Israel, he circulated images showing the horrors of Lodz, including these in his own books and as testimony in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. However, Ross apparently took no further interest in the domestic photographs, which have remained unprinted until today. In 1997, after Ross's death, his son sold the archive to a private collection in London and only now has the breadth of Ross's record of ghetto life been freshly examined for the first time. For an audience accustomed to seeing dramatic photographs of suffering in the Polish ghettos, the quiet, domestic scenes he recorded are a revealing and poignant surprise, and an important addition to the historical record.Edited by Martin Parr, the book's foreword is by highly respected Holocaust historian and expert Robert-Jan Van Pelt.