New exhibition featuring photography by Kate Middleton launching at Salford’s Imperial War Museum to mark Holocaust Memorial Day

Photography by Kate Middleton is part of a new exhibition featuring over 60 contemporary portraits to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2023, including never-seen-before photographs from North West-based Holocaust survivors.

Opening on Friday January 27 at the Imperial War Museum North, Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors aims to shine a light on the special connections between Holocaust survivors and the younger generations of their families, and our collective responsibility to ensure their stories live on.

This free exhibition showcases the work of 13 members and fellows from the Royal Photographic Society alongside intimate portraits taken by RPS Patron Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales.

After an inaugural run at the IWM London, Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, offers visitors the opportunity to reflect on the “unimaginable loss and trauma” suffered by those photographed and the chance to discover the “special legacy which their children and grandchildren will carry into the future.”

Itzick ‘Ike’ Alterman; whose father died in the Buna work camp and mother, 14-year-old sister and nine-year-old brother were transported to the Treblinka death camp and murdered upon arrival of the Nazis in 1942, is one of the four newly – photographed survivors.

Simon Hill, President of the RPS, who photographed Ike Alterman, emphasised the importance of this exhibition: “I think this is a tremendously important exhibition, and to be able to tell the story of man’s inhumanity to man from the first person is truly remarkable, it’s a period of history about 70 years ago, and we are very fortunate to have survivors still around that can tell us our story.” 

“This is one of those projects that we are actually using photography to tell a story. To tell the story of each one of these 60 survivors and 13 or 14 photographers have been invited to tell those stories through photography.

“I think on the one hand we are demonstrating with photography to communicate, and the second is that we are using photography as a vehicle to tell a story, so hopefully we are doing photography a favour and doing a great benefit to the survivors. 

Hill is a multi-award winning photographer, and revealed that Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors was one of his favourite exhibitions to photograph.

“It ranks really really highly, I’d say right at the top because i’m photographing history and the personality and the character of somebody from history that experienced an event that we have only read about, we’ve never experienced this for ourselves.”

Photographs on display are accompanied by the My Voice project by The FED, which has documented the lives of each of the survivors. 

Carolyn Mendelsohn was one of the 13 photographers invited to take part in the exhibition, and spoke of the “privilege” of working with some of the survivors. 

“I was immediately drawn to it because there were people in my family who had to escape from different parts of the world and I felt a real connection to their individual stories.

“But also because for me as a photographer and an artist, it’s a privilege to be involved in others people’s lives and to make the portraits with them, so it crossed over lots of issues I was interested in but also to meet these extraordinary people.”

The exhibition arrives at Salford’s Imperial War Museum after being exhibited in London and Bristol.

James Bulgin, the content leader of the IWM’s Holocaust galleries, says that the exhibition offers a “powerful and important reminder.”

“These remarkable images of survivors and the generations that have followed them are a powerful and important reminder that despite the catastrophic destruction of the Holocaust, Hitler’s intention to destroy all Jewish life and culture across Europe was ultimately unsuccessful. In showing the dynamism and diversity of those that endured and flourished, we are given cause to reflect on the profound significance of what has continued and the tragic extent of what was lost.”

Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, presented in partnership with RPS, Jewish News, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Dangoor Education and The Fed will run until the summer 2023.