Through the Lens of Faith : Auschwitz

Through the Lens of Faith is Caryl Englanders original and affecting visual archive of witnesses of the Holocaust, presented alongside conversations exploring their diverse belief systems. Englander photographed them during emotive moments of interviewing over the past three years. The resulting portraits encapsulate mnemonic tensions between an unmasterable past and the present.

Englander photographed intense discursive encounters during which writer Henri Lustiger Thaler, chief curator of the Amud Aish Memorial Museum, who has interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors, asked Englanders subjects to share their stories of Auschwitz, centering on the question of faith: how did it express itself in an environment that was its complete antithesis? Lustiger Thalers careful arrangement of the survivors voices presents their complex spiritual responses and narrates the brutality of everyday life in the concentration camp.

Featured in the January 2020 Art newsletter.
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