Looking Through the Lens: An Interview with Loli Kantor

Last year, Fort Worth-based photographer Loli Kantor published a photo book titled Call me Lola: In Search of Mother. The 232-page book features 159 images, including photographs taken by the artist, family photos, and scanned documents and ephemera. Approximately twenty years in the making, the body of work details Kantor’s attempt to retrace her family history, and in doing so to better understand the many people she has lost over the years. While Kantor’s mother is at the heart of the book, the artist’s search for connection reaches back before her mother’s lifetime to family members who died in the Holocaust, and moves past her mother’s death to include the untimely deaths of her father and brother.

Recently I spoke with Kantor about the book, her family history, and her photographic career. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Fuentes (JF): This book includes photographs you’ve captured over the last decade. What was your impetus for going on this journey, and what started you on this path?

Loli Kantor (LK): Even more than a decade. Throughout my life, I had this pain of loss. My father died when I was 14 … right in the middle of [my teenage years]. I always wanted to express myself with the story about this loss, and to say it in writing, before I became a photographer. Then, when I started doing photography, it was always in the back of my mind … that at some point I want to work on the story about my parents. It wasn’t only about investigating who my mother was, but I actually wanted to write about my father, who was very interesting and creative, not in the artsy way, but more as a writer, public speaker, and doctor … I have a lot of material about him, so I wanted to put all this in a book. 

JF: You’ve been processing loss for your whole life. What encouraged you to embark on the production of this book now?

LK: That’s a good question. I have to go back a little bit. I worked extensively with theater, and especially the Hip Pocket Theater here in Fort Worth. I really loved working with them; I followed them, and I participated in their rehearsals and the creative process. After about five years, in 2004, I had an exhibition at the Arlington Museum of Art of this whole [body of] work about the Hip Pocket Theater. 

At that exhibition, one of my friends came and showed me an ad in a paper looking for volunteers in Poland to dig in a big open field that used to be a cemetery, and then a concentration camp. The Nazis built a labor camp over the cemetery; it was Kraków-Płaszów, [the concentration camp depicted in] Schindler’s List. I thought, “Wow, what an opportunity.” 

So I thought I would go to Poland and I volunteered to work there for one month. We worked outside, and when it was raining, we didn’t work. So I went to my father’s hometown and my mother’s hometown, and I started to research them. In that opportunity, going to Poland was the first time I was dealing with the Holocaust, which is part of my background. Then I was also investigating my parents themselves and their towns. 

I went to see their towns. I had all kinds of old photographs, and I found the street where a photograph was taken of my grandfather, who perished in the Holocaust, and I stood there on the corner, in the same spot. I went to look for different places, based on addresses and documentation in these archives I had. And that was the beginning of this project.

JF: What was the experience like, in Poland, working at a former concentration camp?

LK: It was huge. When you are a second-generation Holocaust survivor, which is what I am — a daughter of survivors, which means that their parents and their brothers and sisters did not survive — you’re surrounded by all that, and some of it is spoken, some of it is quiet. It’s a whole generation of the people who are children of East Europeans who survived the Holocaust and moved on, some to Israel, some to America. 

So this is my family, my friends, my teachers, my old surroundings. Most of us didn’t have any grandparents or uncles and aunts. I guess they disappeared in “the war,” that’s how World War II was talked about. But when I actually went to Poland, and I went to the archive, and I saw my grandfather’s name as the head of a family: “Jew.” It’s categorized as Jew, and … I really saw the names, and realized that they’re gone, that they were murdered. It hit me very hard, at that time.

I grew up with this, so they weren’t part of my life. They were just part of a non-memory that I had… of photographs… of here and there. But [being there] actually gave me more of an understanding. I felt very connected to Poland. I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t there with anger at the Polish people that I was dealing with because they were helping me. They were really amazing. Being there I made many friends. I deepened my connection to Poland, and I loved being there. 

I made friends over these 10 years that I was traveling back and forth to Poland, and also in Ukraine. I ended up going there, because in Ukraine, I found living [survivors]. It wasn’t just memories. In Poland, in 2004, you really didn’t find many. Some of them were still undercover as Christians. But it was a very important time for me to connect to that culture … language … the food there, I grew up on it. I enjoyed it, and I felt the right pain that I needed to feel. It was cathartic.

JF: This book is centered around your search for understanding about your mother. Your mom died a few hours after you were born. As a child, what was your understanding of her as a person? What did people tell you about her?

LK: I didn’t know anything about my mom as a child because my father remarried when I was two years old. He married a widow with two children — my brother Joe and sister Mickey. Joe died a couple years ago, in Florida, and Mickey is still living in Israel. They’re not my biological siblings, but we were cross adopted. 

So my father married when I was two years old, and I was not told anything about [my mother’s death]. It was kind of hidden. And also, in those times, and also that generation, they didn’t tell children everything … It was a different mentality. 

My brother Ami, who was four years older than I, told me, “You know, Mommy is not your real mother, but you can’t tell anybody.” I was about four when he told me that and so I didn’t tell anybody. I had to keep it a secret. I remember I told one of my classmates in elementary school, and she later told her mom. 

I wasn’t told anything about my mother. They didn’t talk about her at all. There were no pictures, nothing. So I didn’t even know what she looked like. After my stepmother, Miriam, died when I was 10, I was looking through my father’s closet. Under his shirts, there was a drawer, and I opened it, and there were all kinds of things he was hiding from us. There was also a photograph of my mother, which I included in my book. It was the first photo I saw of her. I thought, “It must be my mother, because my brother was blonde, and he kind of looked like her.”

JF: Was it around that age that you and your father talked about your mother?

LK: My dad spoke about it later and took me to her grave when I was about 12. My Bat Mitzvah days. In Israel, you celebrate when you’re 12, and that’s sort of an age that you tell children things. He talked a little bit about her. She had two sisters who left for Israel before Hitler came to power in Germany. 

One of them told me, here and there, about my mother. “Oh, she was so beautiful… She was blonde, had blue eyes, and she was so energetic.” She always talked about her. I also had an uncle — I was very close to him, he survived the war with her — and he told me about my mother too. I heard about her more the older I got. My father died when I was 14, and it was then I uncovered some of the photographs he had kept.

JF: Thank you for sharing. This gives us some context for the concept of the book. Can you tell me a little about when and how you started practicing photography? 

LK: I was in my 50s. I was a physical therapist, but it wasn’t my biggest passion. I always loved the arts and had artist friends. I took a workshop with Leighton McWilliams, who taught at the University of Texas at Arlington and Texas Christian University. Then I started taking photos in Mali in 2000, when I went on a month-long voluntary mission with my husband, Scott. I took photos there and when I came back I developed and published them. Then I started photographing at the Hip Pocket Theater, and they asked me to be the resident photographer in 2001. I attended a week-long documentary workshop at Amherst with DoubleTake Magazine. Then when Scott finished his medical studies, I told him I wanted to quit my job and do photography.

I built a darkroom, and then I started going to Tarrant County College, after about a couple of years, to do independent studies. I studied with Peter Feresten, Richard Doherty, and some others. I worked with Hip Pocket, with Bruce Wood Dance Company in Dallas, with the Fort Worth Star Telegram, and with the Van Cliburn Foundation. Those were my main projects.

JF: How long did you work for the Star Telegram?

LK: Until they let go of their primary photographers, and they became their freelancers. But the problem was I started traveling a lot, so I couldn’t commit. I started traveling to Europe. I was working on a project for 10 years about the Holocaust survivors and the Jewish presence in Eastern Europe. That work was featured in my book, Beyond the Forest, which was published in 2014.

JF: How did that project influence your latest book?

LK: There are a few photographs in this book that were made during the time I worked on the other project. This book is a direct outcome, in a way, [but] now I’m talking about myself. I wanted to talk about myself for a while, but I really wanted to go to see these communities. I had the opportunity and it was time, because these people were getting older and dying. Now a lot of them are gone. They were in their 70s, and I was in my 50s. So it was a good time for me to do this. 

Beyond the Forest also influenced [the new book], because I didn’t really focus only on Holocaust memorials at that time. I focused rather on survivors and on Jewish return and Jewish cultural return in Eastern Europe … It wasn’t about the loss, it was about the rebuilding, which was very slow, but there was rebuilding and I noticed it. So that kind of influenced this, because I did visit memorials that had to do with my own family, in the two or three death camps where my family unfortunately died, and [those photographs were taken] during that time.

JF: How did going through the process of researching, photographing, and then putting it all together change or inform your thoughts about who your mother was?

LK: I think, as a visual person, I always need to see, to read, but also to see proofs and photographs of things and items. I’m really drawn to details of objects and people, I’m drawn to not only their voices, but also how they appear. That really helped me — I knew my brother very well and knew my father very well, but not my mother. It really helped me figure her out better. 

All of us inherit some of our parents: looks, habits, energy, and thought processes. I could really figure out, based on me and my brother and my father, who she was. And Nissan N. Perez [who wrote the introductory essay in the book] thought that I made a lot of it up, which I probably did, but it really helped me realize the strong connection I have with her, and made me see that it goes to other generations, like to my children, and even my niece and nephew. I see her clearly, totally. I like her a lot.

JF: What are some of the things you see in her that you also see in yourself?

LK: Some of the artistic tastes, in terms of the way I dress. I always liked big watches; I never used to wear ladies watches. I saw photos of her back in the 40s, in a swimsuit with her funky glasses. Her taste and style, I think she had creative energy. And I think she was a very street smart woman. I heard from others that she had a lot of energy, which I do too.

JF: How has your family responded to the book?

LK: They love it. They are so thankful I made it. Everybody who was involved in the book all say, “You gave us something so important to have,” and I’m happy for that. Of course, it’s just a tiny part of the archive, but it’s a great archive for the family.