Uta

UTA, Montabaur, Germany, 1976
Black and white photograph created with 120 film, 20” x 20”, Artist’s Collection

When I began experimenting with the masks, my partner Uta was my muse. Uta grew up in Germany, where I shot this photo. She posed with the masks playfully, and made one on her own face. It was the mid-1970s, and Germany still cast a dark shadow as it reconstructed its image after the brutality of the Holocaust. When visiting Germany, I was hypervigilant—and still held images in my mind of pale, emaciated figures who perished in the Nazi gas chambers. I tried hard to separate out my new, loving family from that recent past. But now, when I see Uta in my mask, that old fear surfaces. If I, a Jewish boy, had been in Germany during the Nazi times, I, too, might have met a brutal end. And then the fear subsides. Germany has radically transformed, and the world has moved on. In my eyes, the mask, too, transforms into an object of beauty, exemplified by Uta—a person who would play a significant role in building a more just world. When I see her in my mask, I see the hope for transformation that still lies within myself.

UTA, Lincoln Center, New York City, 2023
Digital color print, 20” x 20”,
Artist’s Collection

I hadn’t seen Uta for many years, as she moved to California. But recently we began to meet on her visits to New York with her husband. In 2023, we meet in Lincoln Center and she again models for me in the frowning mask. In the late afternoon cold of early winter, we walked among the sculptures of Henry Moore, Alexander Calder and Elie Nadelman. Looking at her now, it appears that the mask has aged more than Uta, who’s still playful, proud, and critical, still looking out at the beauty before her, wondering whether she and her world will stagnate or change. Her mask and her persona are fine compliments to the reflections in the pond and the diagonals of the walkways just behind her.