160 pages, 85 duotone images
Clothbound with jacket
978-1-59711-449-3
September 25, 2018

Aperture

I had known Judy Glickman Lauder for years–having worked together on several exhibitions and projects at the Portland Museum of Art–when she and her studio assistant, photographer Melonie Bennett, approached me about helping with a book project. Judy’s poignant photographs of former Nazi concentration camps had circulated in a wide-reaching series of exhibitions for nearly three decades but had never before been published comprehensively in book format. Further, Judy had recently completed a series of photographs commemorating one of the Holocaust’s rare stories of triumph and uplift: how Denmark, as a nation, worked through both open diplomacy and surreptitious cover to rescue its Jewish citizens. It is the only European nation that can claim to have done so.

It was a great honor to help Judy, Melonie, and designer Margo Halverson over a period of years to ready the book for publication by providing developmental and copy editing and, ultimately, by drafting the promotional language that appears, in a somewhat revised form, on Aperture’s site. We had several long, collegial meetings both in Judy’s beautiful Maine home on the ocean and in Margot’s warm and inviting kitchen, her giant standard poodle offering regular feedback. Despite the gravity of the subject matter—and the awful irony that the book has appeared just as we are witnessing a rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, marked by the October 27 mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead—this was a dream project, and one that I will long remember as a particularly meaningful one.