Debbie Teicholz

Artworks

	Untitled from Prayer by the Wall, 1991 Photograph 35" x 64" Teicholz's photos use some of the standard symbols which have emerged in recent Holocaust work: barbed wire, railroad tracks, scorched earth, mysterious vistas in towns and near railroad stations, cut trees that appear as bones.
	Untitled from Prayer by the Wall, 1991 Photograph 35" x 64"
	Untitled from Prayer by the Wall, 1991 Photograph 94" x 35"
	Untitled from Prayer by the Wall, 1991 Photograph 64" x 35"

Artist Statement

Teicholz is currently living in New Jersey. Her father, a survivor, worked with Raoul Wallenberg, the famous Swedish diplomat who saved 5,000 Jews in Budapest by giving them Swedish protection and passports. Her photography reflects manipulated image with tinting to suggest how survivors and their extended family see common elements of today's work in the context of the past. Note the triptych of cut logs, and the effect of appearing like bodies. When the artists sees tracks, she thinks of deportations. The series of four six foot long photographic triptychs are called Prayer by the Wall.

"I was born to Eastern European Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in the atmosphere of the Holocaust, living amid a plethora of personal accounts, Holocaust photographs and neurosis. I have chosen not to use archival images as symbols because I feel these images, which belong to our collective consciousness, often have a distancing effect on the viewer, because they are so recognizable and therefore emotionally dismissable. These images were photographed in Israel and Budapest in 1991 and 1992. They are intended to summon up associations of the Holocaust. As I smelled the freshly turned-over, rich, amber rows of Israeli earth, I thought about the rows of train tracks, and I still hear the silent screams. I walk through life with a displaced step, therefore I have chosen the triptych form to bear witness to the rhythm of the present past-present time warp in which I travel daily."

Teaching Applications

Questions

1. What images of the Holocaust are seen in the symbols the artist has chosen to photograph?
2. Can one look at tracks in the same way after knowing about Nazi processes of extermination?
3. In one image, the earth appears to be on fire. Is this a valid image?
4. Another image shows a swastika as graffiti on the wall. Is this a valid image? What does it say about prejudice in the contemporary world?
5. One image looks like bones, What are we looking at? Why did the artist do this?