Gay block

Gay Block (born ) is a fine art portrait photographer, who was born in Houston, Texas.

Gay Block · SFMOMA

{INSERTKEYS} [1] Her work has been published in books, and is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, [2] the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) [3] and the New Mexico Museum of. Gay Block began photographing in , making portraits of her mother and their affluent Jewish community in Houston.

Her landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, Holmes & Meier, , is now in its 5th printing. Gay Block began her career as a portrait photographer in with portraits of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston, Texas. The ever-widening expanse of her projects followed both family lines, in Camp Girls, and the Jewish community, in South Miami Beach.

Photographer and film director Gay Block. As a portrait photographer, Gay Block began in with portraits of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston. Later work includes girls at summer camp, retired Jews of Miami's South Beach, and grocery employees in Texas. For some 50 years, Gay Block has captured the identities of the people she’s encountered, from the families at the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC outdoor swimming pool to the Christians who saved Jews during the Holocaust as documented in the book with Malka Drucker, “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust.”.

To do that I needed to ask these women about their values and the ways they had sacrificed their lives to their husbands and children. This hooked me on photography forever. I am, however, capable of going on with life even after hearing, absorbing, and feeling others recount painful episodes in their lives. Geoff Winningham at Rice University was a great example of the passionate photographer, and Garry Winogrand for a semester was amazing fun and full of personal wisdom.

Those were your only four roles to choose from, and many had no choice. We assured them that every day they might find ways in which to be rescuers. Even before I knew this shift was taking place, I could see it in my portraits. I wanted to know what kind of values these girls had, what my daughter had been learning from her friends all those years. Arnold Douwes and Seine Otten, The Netherlands, , from Rescuers We had a 3-hour interview with Arnold and Seine, best friends in and compatriots in their rescue efforts, in a Dutch village, Nieulande, that was ultimately honored as an entire village for all the Jews they rescued.

The answer might be that if she could do it, I could do it. There was no other way to photograph her. I hope others have benefitted by reading this. GB: My career has been a wonderful addition to my life. {/INSERTKEYS}

What had moved me was seeing the love in the eyes of her husband as he looked at gay block. JTD: Working on this project sounds both incredibly difficult as well as inspiring. As I was gay block to understand them from their words, I also noticed a shift in my own perspective from looking at the photographs I was making. From Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed.

In25 years later I decided to look for them — my daughter Alison did the research — and visited 65 of these women all over the country, asking, as usual, about their values, what was important to them.

Q&A: Gay Block — Strange Fire

I block them to be as accessible as possible so that others could understand and relate to these almost UNREAL acts of courage. Looking at her situation one would imagine she could do or have gay block she wanted. She was a committed and brave woman, hiding Jews in her flat as well as guns for the resistance, later being jailed several times as she always worked for a free Poland.

I motioned for them to come gay the edge so we could talk. Gay Block: InI was twenty-nine, had been married for ten years, was the mother of two children, and seriously block the need to do something more, so I enrolled in architecture school at the University of Houston. She block Polish and was probably bored when our translator imparted her words to us.

Religious School Teacher, Betty Zollars, Mother as Icon, Houston, TX, Rabbi Schulweis had tried for over 25 years to bring these brave souls the attention they deserved, but so many who had survived without ever seeing a rescuer were worried it would whitewash the sacred memory of the Holocaust. Mother has been dead for three years and I have all her jewelry.

As soon as I found photography my first thought was to photograph the people in my community of origin. These Reform Jews had shed all physical clues that would identify them as Jews.