July 12



NEW YORK:

Shadows Cast by a Loving Father and the Holocaust


Many photographs are haunted by the future, by events that unfolded after
the shutter clicked. Knowing what came next, or later, or in the end, we
read power into them while also feeling powerful ourselves: we in the
present know more than the people in the pictures did. Their innocence is
part of the photos' aura.

We read this power into the childhood photographs of people who achieve
greatness, or at least notoriety, from Sigmund Freud to Paris Hilton. We
also read it into images of the soon-to-be tragic for example the
exquisite children of the last czar of Russia or President John F. Kennedy
and his wife descending from the airplane at Love Field in Dallas and the
newly tragic, like teenagers killed in a Saturday-night car crash whose
high school pictures run in Monday's paper.

The weight of history to come, in terms of both greatness and tragedy,
bears down almost to the point of obliteration on the evocative family
snapshots in "Anne Frank: A Private Photo Album" at the Kraushaar
Galleries at 724 Fifth Avenue.

The show consists of 69 of the many images taken between 1927 and the
summer of 1942, first in Frankfurt and then in Amsterdam, by Otto Frank,
Anne Frank's father, a well-to-do, well-educated businessman who doted on
Anne and her elder sister, Margot. The images introduce a lively,
occasionally experimental amateur in their careful framing, unusual angles
and the recurring presence of the photographer's shadow.

Some are quite lovely; nearly all are tinged with the sadness endemic to
happy family photographs of Europe-between-the-wars vintage. The girls are
the focus; we see them at home, on the beach, at birthday parties. Their
grandmothers, cousins, friends and nannies even their mother, Edith make
cameo appearances. Their world is suffused with warmth and affection.

The images are interesting of course, mainly for an extra-visual fact of
their association with Anne, the gifted teenager whose wartime journal,
written while she and her family lived in hiding for two years in
Amsterdam, became "The Diary of a Young Girl."

First published to almost instant acclaim in 1947, two years after her
death in a German camp, the book made Anne Frank an object of adulation
and her face familiar the world over.

It also gave meaning to the long postwar life of Otto Frank, who alone
from his little family survived the camps, dying peacefully in Basel,
Switzerland, in 1980. He shepherded the diary into print and became the
keeper of his daughter's flame, the guardian of her reputation and to a
great extent the shaper of her image and her message to the world, which,
as he saw it, was hope and universal tolerance.

Central casting could not have come up with a better face, with its dark
hair and unusually large dark eyes, pale skin and delicate bones. The face
was ethereal to begin with and translated exceptionally well into
black-and-white photographs.

Fame and death made it saintly, almost haloed, a luminous ghost. It evoked
the unfulfilled promise of the children snuffed out by the Holocaust by
compressing this incalculable loss into a single vivid, meticulously
personalized catastrophe.

The show at Kraushaar, through July 29, is insuperably charged. The images
are so complicated and clouded with history and possible interpretation
that at times one can hardly look at them.

In some ways they offer an almost indecent opportunity to pore over the
development of Anne Frank's memorable face from infancy to the brink of
adolescence, to search for indications of her special talent and signs of
the diary's distinctive, urgent voice, which moves restlessly among the
tensions and minutiae of life in her hiding place, her highly
self-conscious coming-of-age, her fears about the war and her rage at what
the Germans were doing to the Jews (especially in the 1991 edition, which
restores passages omitted from the original).

Yet while some onlookers may be tempted to note how a writer's appearance
matches her literary voice, Anne usually is indistinguishable here from
the better-behaved, nonwriting Margot.

With their uniformly sunny propriety, these images document the cosseted
life of wealthy Europeans who happened to be assimilated Jews in Germany.
They could be almost any vaguely aristocratic family. (Otto, an officer in
the German Army during World War I, had the distinguished, small-headed
elegance of a greyhound. A postwar photograph of him by Arnold Newman,
included here, suggests an aging cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm.)

Anne and Margot are invariably neatly and well dressed, often in matching
outfits, even at the beach in the Netherlands, where Otto moved the family
in 1934. He went to keep closer tabs on a family business (pectin and
spices), but mainly to escape the anti-Semitism of Hitler's regime. He
hoped that the Netherlands would remain neutral, as in World War I.

There is almost no sign of the gathering political storm. A picture of
Margot in Amsterdam in 1941 shows her sitting on a sun deck, in a typical
hormone-driven teenage pout. Except that the cryptic caption, quoted from
the family photo album, notes that she has just read and thrown down the
day's newspaper that lies beside her.

In other words, the images are slippery. You may find yourself alternating
between uncomfortable conclusions. For example you can feel one minute
that the Franks' private life is being needlessly exploited and the next
that the viewer is being manipulated by glimpses of a fairy-tale life in
Frankfurt. They make Anne's fate seem even more horrible, if that's
possible, by casting her life in the classic Hollywood extremes of safety
and violence, luxury and want.

In addition the Finzi-Contini aura of these images cuts both ways. Otto
and Edith loved their girls so much that they maintained the courage of
their family conventions and the semblance of normalcy practically until
the family went into hiding in June 1942.

Anne's diary was written in a fabric-covered (red and white check) journal
that she picked out as a birthday present. (A remarkably convincing
facsimile is included in this show.) At the same time there is something
almost stifling about the persistent cheer of these images. One can assume
that those from 1941 were taken by a man who knew he should have moved his
family to Switzerland, where his mother and brothers had fled, when he
still had the chance.

After his death Otto was criticized for idealizing Anne's image, for
editing the diary to soften her interest in sex, her perception of her
parents' weak marriage and her hatred of the Germans. This show suggests
that Otto's idealization began long before Anne's death.

Fatherhood fulfilled Otto. But love did not always equal understanding.
After the war he remarked more than once, unselfconsciously, that he did
not know his younger daughter until he read her diary.

Infrequently there is a sense of Anne as one of those children said to
have "an old soul," a glimmer of her lively impatience, incessant
curiosity and nascent charisma. In one photograph she stands on a front
stoop in Amsterdam, primly erect, cocking her wrist to look with mock
sternness at her watch. Otto's shadow looms, suggesting a friendly giant
arriving late and also, as a friend of mine pointed out, a man unable to
separate from his children.

In another image from 1941 Anne leans over the balcony of their modern
Dutch apartment, looking back at Otto with the city behind her. One of the
few photographs in the show that are not spatially intimate and contained,
it shows her in effect dangling before a vortex of deep space. It captures
an incipient wildness that glimmers from only a few images, the dark
circles speaking of her worried acuity. Once more the future speaks to us:
Anne is pictured as if moving toward her final destination, far beyond
Otto's loving protection.

(source: New York Times)