Camera Button

Dear Dana, we’ve known each other for several good years through our shared work on trauma and the visual. In the year since October 7, 2023, you’ve managed to do the impossible and function: you created an important photo book, Album Darom (Album of the South), which brings together the work of 107 photographers, capturing scenes from the Western Negev. At the same time, you’re now working on the Album Tzafon (Album of the North).

You’re a photographer, researcher, and lecturer, and every time we speak, you’re in another country, presenting your Phantom Project, which you’ve been working on since 2009. You deal with the remnants of dictatorships around the world. But today, we’re here to talk about the artist’s book that might be considered your most personal work. Your book that’s "closest to home": Camera Button. I feel it encapsulates much of your work, almost a metonym for all the other books you've made so far. Let’s start from the beginning – how is a book born?

You know how you have something tucked away in a drawer? For 20 years, I’ve been saying I’ll do something with it, and it never happens. It all started with my not-so-random visit to Yad Vashem. It was 2005, and I was head of the Department of History & Theory at Bezalel. Because I’m a "Nazi researcher" I was asked to organize a tour for the department heads at the museum, which had just reopened after extensive renovations.

As I exited the first wing, which deals with Nazi ideology, a young woman doing her National Service at the Museum stopped me and asked, “Do you have someone here?” I didn’t quite understand at first, but she meant the Pages of Testimony project. I answered with the kind of cynicism reserved for Nazi researchers: “No, my grandparents got out in time.” But she wouldn’t let up: “Maybe your grandfather filled out Pages of Testimony?” I followed her to the computer, and within minutes, 23 Pages of Testimony from my grandfather surfaced, telling the story of his family and my grandmother’s family who were murdered after they immigrated to Israel in 1934. The murder took place on October 7, 1941, the first day of Sukkot in the town of Nadvorna, which is now part of Ukraine.

Wow.
Yes, we all have something tied to this date now. For two decades, I kept telling myself, “I have to do something with these pages,” and so 13 years passed. In 2018, I was invited for the first time in my life to give an artist lecture – of all places, in Kyoto (Japan). The audience was art students, and their professor explained to me that they didn’t know much about the Holocaust. So, I allowed myself to speak in two voices: as a Nazi researcher trying to make sense of the “big” story and as an artist with a personal story. In preparation for the lecture, I built a family tree for the first time in my life using my grandfather’s Pages of Testimony. I discovered that 23 members of the Zamler family (on my grandfather’s side) and the Handelsman family (on my grandmother’s side) were murdered. I vaguely remembered a community book my grandmother had once brought home, but I didn’t know where it was, so I decided to look for it on the Library of Congress website, where everything was available. That’s how I reencountered the Nadvorna Memorial Book.

So, essentially, this artist's book was born from another book you hadn’t known before.
It was completely crazy. I remember sitting at the computer, staring at the scanned copy, memories of where I’d seen this book in my childhood slowly began surfacing. I must have been about 12 at the time, and I had completely pushed it out of my memory. The memory of my grandmother excitedly bringing the book home, along with all its contents, had been completely suppressed. I remember calling my mom and discovering that she had kept my grandmother’s copy, and what amazed me was that my grandmother had allowed me to scribble on it with a pencil. The memory came back so vividly that I could even feel the prickly fabric of her sofa in her living room on 6 Kovshei Katamon Street. I remembered how my grandmother would tell me to write: “Here was the elementary school” and “Here was Grandpa’s shop.” I saw my own handwriting. And I realized how much that scrapbook had accompanied me all my life as a repressed memory.

Amazingly, you didn’t remember, considering you researched European history. It feels like this memory was lodged in your subconscious like an unresolved question that fueled your research.
Yes… and not only. On the opening page of the book, I discovered the name of my grandmother’s brother, Jacob – the photographer responsible for all the photographs in the book.

But how did discovering the community book lead you to make a new artist's book?
At that time, I was part of a research group of creators and scholars at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, focusing on Holocaust memory. We met for several years, and to mark the end of the project, we decided each of us would contribute a text. Mine was titled Camera Button.

The book containing all these texts is called But There Was Love – Designing Holocaust Memory [Editors Michal Govrin, Dana Fribach-Hafez, Eti Ben-Zaken, Carmel Publishing, Jerusalem 2021]. I chose four photographs from The Nazi Phantom project, which is a photography project focused on the culture of memory that I’ve been working on for over a decade. I wrote about the photographs, and this was the first “output” that led me to delve back into my grandparents’ community book. We also held a final exhibition where I selected works by Gary Goldstein, and he selected photographs of mine.

The second stage of the process occurred in 2022. I connected with a special group of women involved in craftwork. This was a few months after another of my artist's books, The Zionist Phantom, was published, in which I examine our culture of memory in Israel. After my lecture, they invited me to join their annual exhibition, which sparked an idea to do something involving textiles. I decided that this piece would be a tribute to my grandmother, who was a seamstress. I posted on Facebook that I was looking for books with fabric samples, like those used in upholstery shops. Many kind people responded, and after gathering several fabric books, I tried to imagine which one my grandmother would have loved the most.

It sounds like The Nazi Phantom and The Zionist Phantom began to intertwine – was that something you expected?
I found it difficult to mix the two, I have to admit. I did everything I could to avoid it… I respond through documentary photography, and The Phantom Project is divided into geographic regions. There’s a clear dividing line between countries that experienced dictatorships and Israel. So, I decided it needs two separate sites: The Zionist Phantom and The Phantom Project, which the Nazi Phantom is part of.

Suddenly, I found myself cutting out sentences from the text Camera Button and placing them on the fabric book I had made. That’s how the artist’s book Camera Button was born. The sentences are laid on a fabric base, varying with different types of cloth. I added photographs from my family’s history. It created a kind of “surface” where the history of my grandmother, her younger brother, and my grandfather could all connect.

Did you exhibit this book?
In 2022, curator Yuval Etsioni, who curated the exhibition for the Israel Craft Association, contacted me to showcase the original work. It was a group exhibition with particularly talented artists, and I presented four objects: the original text printed on fabric; the fabric book constructed like a collage; a silkscreen print I made at the Jerusalem Print Workshop based on a childhood photo of me with pigtails; and also Camera Button with two thimbles, engraved with the words Sieg and Heil, based on the original Nazi font.

The thimbles are an inside joke from a Nazi researcher?
You could say that; it’s quite an amusing and outrageous story. Throughout my work on The Nazi Phantom, I kept telling myself that when I found the original Nazi thimble with the inscription Sieg and Heil, that would be the sign that the project was finished. That’s how I could say my grandmother “settled the score” with them. I specifically searched for the thimble because she was a seamstress. Inspired by her, I collect buttons and always look for sewing machine-related accessories.

The Nazis produced dozens of designed items with their symbols. Time and time again, I found myself drawn to photographing these kinds of objects in concentration camps and in every place with a collection of Nazi artifacts. For 15 years, I searched for that Nazi thimble but never found it. For this exhibition, I decided to take my grandmother’s thimble and engrave Seig and Heil on it. I went to an engraver in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, after preparing a model of the original Nazi font and gave him instructions. But because he didn’t ask me why I wanted “Seig” and “Heil” engraved, and it was clear to me that he had no idea of its historical significance, I intuitively decided at the last moment to keep my grandmother’s original thimble and gave him another one I had bought. Get this! I was lucky because he engraved the letters backward, and we had to do it again.

Where did the idea to include the button camera in the exhibition come from? What is it exactly?
A button camera is a very small camera, the kind used by spies or secret police during the Cold War. They used to hide the camera in a coat and take pictures through buttonholes—hence the name. I knew about these cameras, but I didn’t see them in person until my visit to the Stasi Museum in Berlin in 2011 and again recently (in 2024) at the Stasi Museum in Leipzig. In some way, I couldn’t stop thinking about the connection between my grandmother’s buttons, her younger brother’s cameras, and myself… stuck with a button camera. The very act of trying to weave this story together felt like shifting tectonic plates.

If we’re to be cliché, was there something "liberating" about making this book?

“Photography liberates” is a constant for me, even over time. Like an oncologist who confronts the scariest disease and sometimes adopts a cynical or ironic perspective, I find myself doing the same. I must admit that as long as I could hide behind research, it was easier. But once I shifted to creation and speaking in the first person, it became exponentially more challenging. The dichotomy between research and creation, along with the need to separate the “big story” of the Nazis from my small family narrative, didn’t come easily. I remember embarking on my first Phantom Project journey in 2009, convinced it would be a one-time endeavor due to the immense exposure involved. But the opposite happened: photography didn’t free me; it became my primary mode of expression, tightening its grip. I delved deeper, and now I feel that trauma is more present in my life. As a “researcher,” I engaged in academic writing, but that doesn’t prepare you for confronting personal stories.

It’s hard not to think about how you create interfaces between texts and images in your other projects, and also to think about your most recent book, Album of the South [Yedioth Books, 2024], which is a community book in itself. How do you see your role as a researcher-storyteller after October 7th?

I must say that the topic of community books has been in my blood for a long time. The two books I dedicated to the assassination of Rabin were based on in-depth interviews with creators. In fact, The Phantom Project is always engaged in conversation with the audience, as I constantly invite responses to my photographs.

As for the events following October 7th, I must say that tens of thousands of Israelis are now displaced, coming from both the South and the North. Many of them are the sons and daughters of the kibbutzim, and there’s a harsh feeling that there is no room for their voices today, neither politically nor collectively. For years, I’ve studied artists who were forced into exile, and now I observe with great distress our founding generation: those who are still with us and those who aren’t, those like my grandparents, who gave everything they had. I remember distinctly that when I worked on The Zionist Phantom, I was often asked, “Where does this mourning for Zionism come from?” That was in 2020, and I wasn’t always comfortable with that question. But now, with the project I worked on after October 7th, the pain of the phantoms strikes me with a force I hadn’t felt before. Album of the South unites the pain of the different artists involved, allowing their experiences to be heard, and I believe that creation has immense power in the healing journey.

What makes this even more difficult for me is the fact that I’ve spent thirty years of my life studying the twilight time in Germany. The Weimar Republic, from 1919 until Hitler’s rise to power was characterized by political instability, with five elections in Germany in 1932 alone, just before the Nazis came to power. But it was also a time of culture wars. I never could have dreamed we’d find ourselves in this situation. The attack on the left reflects an autoimmune disease our state is grappling with, and we all share responsibility, as this psychosis is pervasive. Nonetheless, I still want to believe in life and in peace.

I belong to the generation that underwent its primary political socialization after the murder of Emil Grunzweig, the First Lebanon War, and the First Intifada. Those were turbulent days in Jerusalem, and we were beaten by the police at the Peace Now protests. These things aren’t new. Even the claim of civil war isn’t new. But we must do everything to avoid that. At the same time, the fracture is unbearably deep. Sometimes I think to myself that it’s a blessing my grandparents aren’t here to witness this terrible rift now. We should have resolved this terrible conflict the minute after the 1967 occupation because power corrupts—and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Do you think we were too focused on the Holocaust to see it?
In my view, it’s tragic that over the years, in the face of our collective trauma, we as a society have been unable to confront the reality of the occupation and find a resolution. After a terrorist attack or war, people always ask, "How many died? How many were injured?" Until the events of October 7th, it seemed we could endure because we had never faced such a severe blow. I’ve been asked countless times how I feel about the comparison between the Holocaust and the events of October 7th. The numerical comparison is simply one day in the hell that was then. But this only highlights how deeply scarred we are, as everything pales in the shadow of the six million. Ultimately, we live with the 'radioactive fallout' that Yolanda Gampel so insightfully discusses.

I want to return for a moment to your work with touch, which is unique to this book. There’s a combination here between photography, which is also a kind of touch, and sewing and gluing—actions that try to anchor themselves in the body.
That’s very interesting, what you’re saying. It’s something I learned as a child from my grandmother, who taught me to cut, glue, and sew. In this book, there’s a convergence of these skills, which is why I was eager for us to discuss it together. As we speak, I remember how my grandmother would hang sheets out to air—the billowing fabrics represent a significant visual element in my life; they evoke a kind of post-memory of the open windows in the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe. Additionally, the need for touch plays a role in my attempt to heal.

So, it’s essentially a book that brings together several journeys through space and time.
Yehuda Poliker in “Ash and Dust” constantly asks, “Where are you going?” It’s a cliché that resonates with me perfectly. Until I get to Ukraine, to my grandmother’s village, I probably won’t rest. Or perhaps … until I find that thimble :)

“Where are you going?” is the key question of your Phantom Project—you’re always coming and going. As someone who has known you for a few years, it’s hard to predict in which country your phone will catch you.
Now that I think about it, I’ve been trying to bridge the historical distance by engaging with these traumatic sites for several years. It’s as if I knew that eventually, these things would catch up with us here like this… I was born in 1963, and I’ve always felt like I belong to the generation of Children of the Sun: the Zionist dream—tanned, wearing sandals without socks, eating watermelon. The significant fracture of my grandparents was hidden from us, yet it also propelled us forward. As a child, I didn’t understand how young and vulnerable Israel was. Now I do, and I think that through Button Camera and The Zionist Phantom, it’s become clear to me that I’m witnessing the end of Zionism as I knew it in my childhood.

Who did you dedicate the book to?
To my grandmother, Chaya, of course, who passed away in 2016.

Making a book is like…
has only one copy, and it connects me to my childhood. I’ve created over 12 books, but this one is unique—it’s the one that means the most to me. Now it’s out in the world.

Whom should we invite to Ma’al’elet?
Bunker by Gary Goldstein and Days of War, the new one by Tamir Shafer. They’re both brilliant.