CONVERSATION BETWEEN LOLI KANTOR AND DANNA HELLER

This excerpt from the interview between Loli Kantor, an Israeli-American photographer, and her daughter, Danna Heller, a curator and art historian, offers an intimate exploration of memory, loss, and artistic legacy. Kantor has spent over twenty years creating a body of work centered on personal and cultural memory, particularly through her book Call Me Lola. In this moving photo essay, Kantor delves into her family’s history, focusing on her mother, Lola, who passed away shortly after her birth. The conversation between mother and daughter sheds light on how these themes of displacement, trauma, and identity are interwoven into both their lives and artistic practices, while also highlighting the profound impact of their shared visual language. Together, they reflect on the intersections of memory, art and family heritage.

Danna Heller: Ima, this body of work uncovers your family’s archive, primarily assembled by Zwi, your father, a Polish-born doctor, medical researcher, journalist, and political activist. The archive maps Zwi’s life in Poland, Russia, post-war Germany, France, and Israel, as well as the lives of your immediate family. It includes family photographs, wartime and post-war documents, and personal objects belonging to your mother, Lola. When did you first become connected to the archive?

Loli Kantor: My father died suddenly on March 2, 1966. With his death, in a sense, I lost everything. At the same time, so much about my life was revealed to me for the first time. I became aware of what he left behind. Less than one month after he died, I was moved out of our home in Tel Aviv to join my extended family in Rehovot, a town south of Tel Aviv, who generously took me in. Although I was completely devastated, I tried to gather up everything I could get my hands on before moving away. I took documents and photographs with me, and any information I could find that related to my mother. I also arranged a new binder and filled it with whatever pertained to my own situation at that time.

DH: You have carefully kept these remnants with you from the age of fourteen, but I believe it was only much later, when you became a photographer and started working on your own biographical story, that you made more revelatory discoveries.

LK: As you know, for much of my life I was a full-time working mother, so I never had the time to investigate the material. It was only at the age of fifty or so, when I began looking closely at the documents and photos—paper by paper—that I found out more. My wish had been to fill the gaps in my autobiographical story.

DH: When I was growing up, you were always taking photos, but I recall very vividly your decision to leave your successful career as a physical therapist to pursue photography. I had just given birth to my son, Segev, and you had just decided to take on photography as a profession. You were in your late forties, as was the Victorian artist Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) who began photography late in life, or the American photographer Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934), who was born a hundred years before you.

LK: Käsebier was an inspiration; one of the first books I owned as an aspiring photographer was on her work.

DH: Take me through that first period of your photography, or the first negatives you worked on from your archive.

LK: The first photos I printed in a darkroom were negatives I made from photographs of my parents’ wedding in Munich, of my brother as a child, and of my three children. I presented this work for the first time in 2001 at “Double Take,” a ten-day documentary workshop at Amherst College in Massachusetts. During this workshop, I mentioned that this would be a project I would one day pursue.

DH: There’s the print you created from your mother’s passport, where we can see your handwritten commentary [see image below]. Each time we work in your studio in Fort Worth, Texas, you show me another document you have found or that you’re studying for clues. What inspires you to annotate?

LK: By annotating parts of the archive and leaving the notes visible, I make the documents my own. The hand notations reveal my research process and discoveries; they can clarify something written in another language, though I also like the enigma of not understanding. My annotations connect me to the document, and I become a part of it.

DH: Looking back at your photographic oeuvre, beginning with your performing arts documentary photography and then your work on the re-emergence of Jewish life in Poland and Ukraine, one element is very much apparent: you were the documentarist. You created an intimacy with your subjects, rather like Diane Arbus (1923–1971) or Josef Koudelka (b. 1938) do in their photographs. In this project, however, you are the subject, facing an archive.

LK: My documentary photography, spanning theater, dance, and real-life stories, has also been very much inspired by the documentarian and film director Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930) and the photojournalist and documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015), both of whom I studied with early on as a young photographer. I develop close relationships with my subjects, returning to the same places over and over to deepen the connection and trust. In Ukraine, for example, while documenting the Jewish communities, I followed the revival of the Great Choral Synagogue in the city of Drohobych, which was in Poland before the Second World War. I went there repeatedly to document its evolution from destruction to renewal, which marked a new anchor for the community’s Jewish identity and heritage.

 Header image Loli Kantor and Danna Heller © Yoav Pichersky; Book Images  © Richard Klein