Max Hirshfeld: Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime

Description

Sweet Noise. Love in Wartime is a book of photographs and words about the Holocaust, a subject difficult to grasp and almost impossible to document. It is also a story of love in a time of war, told in a clear voice using compelling black-and-white photographs and simple, evocative language to build a framework around this pivotal moment in history. Hirshfeld's parents, Polish Jews who survived Auschwitz, raised him in a small city in Alabama, where life in the South of the 1950s and 1960s was quiet and, on the surface, mostly idyllic. But lurking under the surface was a remarkable yet tension-filled history that fully revealed itself only after he matured and had a family of his own. He knew the outer perimeters of his parent's story: the challenges of being Jewish in a place that increasingly alienated them, their individual trajectories as they moved through adulthood and their chance meeting in a Nazi-created ghetto where they fell in love. But it took a trip to Poland with his mother in 1993 (and the discovery in 2005 of hundreds of post-war letters between his parents) to more fully acquaint me with the depths of their tragedies and the exceptional love story that began in 1943, sustaining them through the war. Though Sweet Noise features events that began seventy-five years ago, the material is eerily timely. As Eastern Europe grapples with this horrific legacy, and many countries are reassessing their responses to mass immigration, those in a position to bear witness need a supportive environment wherein art and language serve to remind the world what can occur when hatred and the concept of ethnic cleansing are given free rein.

Max Hirshfeld was born in North Carolina in 1951 to parents who survived Auschwitz. He grew up in Decatur, Alabama and moved to Washington, DC to study photography at George Washington University, graduating in 1973. His work has been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kreeger Museum and is represented by leading galleries in Washington, DC and Boston. He has won silver and bronze awards from the Prix de la Photographie Paris and been featured in both Communication Arts and American Photography. Hirshfeld's editorial work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, and other national publications, and his advertising work has been showcased in campaigns for American Airlines, Amtrak, Canon and IBM, among others. Sweet Noise. Love in Wartime is his first book.

A story of fierce love kindled in a time of hate.--Johnny Belknap "Jewish Chronicle" This book provides an intimate look at lives forever changed by the Holocaust--Kenneth Dickerman "Washington Post"