She’s easy to miss, but hard to forget.
There she is, in the corner. She’s not the focal point of the photograph — that’d be the much-decorated Russian Jewish soldier in the middle — but Ida Treistman is definitely there, solemnly observing a San Francisco celebration of the Soviet army’s victory over the Nazis.
“Let me tell you about her,” said San Francisco photographer Ira Nowinski, who snapped that shot and thousands of others documenting Jewish life in the Bay Area and world.
“Because this is what the photographs are all about.”
Nowinski’s photo documentation of Russian émigrés in San Francisco in the early 1980s is a major portion of a career retrospective currently on display at Stanford University’s Peterson Gallery. The exhibition also features his work on Karaites, and Holocaust sites and memorials from around the world.
Nowinski got to know his San Francisco subjects and was a dinner guest at the Treistman home on many nights. Treistman showed him fading, sepia-toned family snapshots from the old country, but the image that most caught his eye was a Russian newspaper featuring a banner headline in Cyrillic and the image of men swinging from the gallows.
Treistman, it seems, was shot and left for dead at Babi Yar. And, years later, she and other Jews discovered that the former mayor of her small town — a collaborator — had won a bigger political race.
Testimony from Treistman and other Jews eventually led to the revelation that the possessions of the town’s dead (and an exhaustive list of the victims’ identities) were stored at the bottom of a dry well. The former mayor and his fellow collaborators were hanged.
Nowinski pauses as he recounts the tale.
“Every one of these photographs has that kind of story.”
The 62-year-old Jewish photographer has built up his name with work covering, among many other subjects, opera performances and the Beatnik poets. But it was his Jewish-themed work that created some of his best and most well-known shots.
Burdened by the sheer mass of his portfolio — and the weighty subject matter of the Shoah — Nowinski decided most of his negatives and more than 1,800 prints should be in the hands of a meticulous and caring institution. So he sold his Holocaust, émigré and Karaite photographs to Stanford a few years back. This is his first retrospective.
“Everyone said [sell] to Stanford, they have a chair of Hebraica and Judaica. If you get placed in that collection there, your stuff can be used. So, I’m really proud of it,” said Nowinski, who first took Karaite photos as a Jewish Bulletin freelancer.
“Anyone who wants to do research and write books and use my photographs, that’s how [my photographs] are going to be used.”
The photographer found a fan in Zachary Baker, Stanford’s Reinhard Family curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections.
Baker places Nowinski on the cutting edge of documenting Holocaust sites and memorials, a project he undertook in the late 1980s when partnering with Shoah historian Sybil Milton for the book “In Fitting Memory.”
“His camp photographs were largely taken under gray skies in autumn or early spring. There is almost a still quality to these photographs. It brings out the horror by the very absence of people,” said Baker, who curated the exhibit “Ira Nowinski: The Photographer as Witness.”
“I think he pays very close attention to what the assignment is. He takes a very strong, emotional interest.”
Nowinski credits his training as a documentary photographer and the now-deceased Milton for the strikingly lucid quality of his Shoah shots.
He put special thought into his approach to photographing the oft-snapped and infamous front gate of Auschwitz. “I made sure you got that electric fence sign right in front of it. Your eye looks through the whole image and you get a psychological blast; it’s not just a picture of a place.”
The retrospective has induced Nowinski to look back at his career, and he’s happy with what he sees.
A lot of the young Russians he photographed in the 1980s still call, and some have become photographers and filmmakers in their own right.
One young woman used Nowinski’s stills in a film that won a $25,000 prize in New York City this year.
“I didn’t want to tell her I never made $25,000, ever, with all the pictures I took,” he said, laughing uproariously. “I was so proud of her.”
“Ira Nowinski: The Photographer as Witness” will be on display until January at Stanford University’s Peterson Gallery in the Cecil H. Green Library. Online exhibit is at: www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/exhibits/nowinski.html.