Life on the Sidelines, with Camera, Rifle and Leopard Skin : Faye Schulman and others contribute to 'Images of Resistance,' now at the Bronfman Family Jewish Community Center

By Josef Woodard NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

December 18, 2009 12:38 PM

'IMAGES OF RESISTANCE'

While a grim historical backdrop underscores the fascinating current exhibition at the Bronfman Family Jewish Community Center, elements of heroism and the too little-known story of Nazi resistance is the strong, driving subplot. With the show "Images of Resistance," we get a field report from the sidelines rather than the front lines, per se, through the revealing and sometimes surprisingly artful photographs by Faye Schulman, who was involved in the stealthy Partisan Nazi resistance movement in Byelorussia.

Timing is on the show's side, coming as it does on the heels of last year's film "Defiance," in which Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber star in a tale of Nazi resistance in the Russian forest. The film gave the phenomenon a rare mass of public exposure.

Schulman's own life story is strongly threaded throughout her portion of the current show, "Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photographs of Faye Schulman." It was her work as a photographer that ensured her survival. As a photographer called upon to shoot Nazi ID photos and develop film, she was spared from a massacre of the Jewish population in her hometown of Lenin in Poland.

Rather than heeding the Nazi plan, however, Schulman went undercover in the forests on the Russian-Polish border for two and a half years. She took photographs as she could, developing negatives under a blanket and making "sun prints" in the absence of a proper darkroom. But she also swapped her camera for a proudly deployed rifle, as we see in the striking image "Faye and Her Rifle," in which our heroine purposefully aims her rifle in the snowy forest while donning a leopard skin coat and hat.

In the show, the images themselves are enhanced and sometimes subverted from expectations by anecdotal texts in the frames. In an image called "Faye With Old Friends," she is seen with smiling, gun-toting young members of the Molotova brigade. As she recounts, "After seeing so many dead and wounded, I felt the ground in White Russia (Byelorussia) was soaked with Jewish blood. Finally, I really see three Jewish boys who are fighting. That's what I was happy about."

Several of the images show a sense of artistry beyond mere documentary function, while texts flesh out the atmosphere of uncertainty. "The Lazebnik Family Home" tells the tale, obliquely, of the burning of a beloved Jewish family's home to deprive the invading Nazis from taking up roost there. "Leaving on a Mission" has an eerie, dream-like beauty about its picture of a couple in a canoe slicing through glassy still water with the bottom half of the composition seen in reflection. We learn that shortly after it was taken, the boy was killed as he stepped on a mine.

The exhibition also follows Schulman's post-war life to some degree, as she married her husband Morris and settled in Toronto. She has been an important resource for the effort to expose this chapter of the wartime experience and Jewish resistance. (See www.jewishpartisans.org.)

As a contrasting but complementary secondary aspect of the show, Greta Schreyer's paintings of the Red Forest and synagogues aflame represent a different perspective, one of the survivor haunted by unfading memories rather than as someone in the thick of the warfare. Schreyer escaped the Nazi dread, emigrating from Austria in 1938, but while in New York, she created these vibrant and volatile canvases based on her stinging memories of the life she left. The results are captured in a feverish painting style mixing expressionistic energies turned abstract and iconic nightmarish images of wooden synagogues going up in flames, images baked in metaphor and grim, rapidly unfolding reality.

When: through Dec. 31

Where: Bronfman Family Jewish Community Center, 524 Chapala St.

Gallery hours: 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday,

8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Friday, closed Saturday and Sunday

Information: 957-1115, jewishsantabarbara.org