Book Review: Invited to Life by B.A. Van Sise

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Book Review: Invited to Life by B.A. Van Sise

February 1st, 2023 by Cary Benbow

Werner Reich – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

“No matter how it might seem, this is not a book about the Holocaust. This is a story of overcoming.”

Invited to Life contains 90 portraits, each with accompanying text by and/or about the person featured on the page, each of whom are Holocaust survivors. Three essays are included from contributors Dr. Mayim Bialik, Neil Gaiman, and a wonderful transmuted echo from her past, Cracked Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark. There is so much included in this book for the reader to soak in. This is a truly powerful collection of images, stories, allegories, and lives.

Engellina Billauer – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

Ernest Weiss – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

Elsie Ragusin – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

The importance of light is palpable in these portraits. Figures are lit in a spare, yet artful and loving manner that embraces each figure. It is extremely difficult to make it look this simple. The light transforms from a simple instrument and becomes representative of amusement and laughter, it is hope in the darkness, it is sunlight from an invisible window that warms and comforts.

The tried and true techniques selected by Van Sise in this project conjure visual metaphors for the passing of time, love, knowledge, or memory (or perhaps remembrance?)…whichever fits the line of poetry Van Sise is writing with light for a particular person.

Blurred movement harkens a sense of the polyglot dreamworlds of Marion Wiesel.

A beam of light flows and drapes around Roald Hoffmann, as if drawn by Picasso himself.

Sparks dance in midair around the body of electrical engineer Peter Tarjan.

The pitch black background Van Sise chose for his portraits enables his sitters to ‘become’ the light source, to appear as if they are illuminating the space around them from within.

In many ways, they are.

Sally Frishberg – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

Marion Wiesel – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

Peter Tarjan – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

The people whose images appear in Invited to Life are often the only object in the frame. They are singularly important, and their visual isolation feels makes them feel small at the same time. This aspect brings an idea to mind. I’m a firm believer that the most meaningful aspects of art, storytelling and life are bearing witness to splendor, and exploring and responding to what it means to be human – but also what it means to be purposeful, relevant, and what it means for a singular person to connect and relate to the universal. By doing so, one single person can make a huge difference. Their life can impact millions of people.

This is the stuff that moves mountains, the small action that ripples across millennia.

Rachel Epstein – Invited to Life © B.A. Van Sise

In closing, I want to include this extended quote from the Introduction written by B. A. Sise:

“There’s a cultural trope that demands that survivors of the Holocaust always be portrayed in a certain way: impossibly old, weak and powerless people once tortured at the whim of tyrants, their faces maps of the world and their souls forever broken.

It isn’t so.

The truth is that the most ordinary of these survivors is still extraordinary. All of them lost their homes; many lost their entire families. Many were tortured, many were slaves. The act of getting up in the morning seems impossible, and yet all of them did: built professions, built loves, built families, built lives. These are not the actions of the powerless. Ambition is made of sterner stuff.

There’s another truth awkward to the common narrative. I have photographed more than 140 survivors, of which 90 fill these pages, and although there are a few exceptions, these are among the most joyous, numinous people one might ever meet, in love with their lives and their renewed lease on them, on their good fortune to have a second chance for a second act to their existence.”

Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust
By B.A. Van Sise
Essays by Dr. Mayim Bialik, Neil Gaiman, Sabrina Orah Mark
Size: 9.0in x 12.0in
Pages: 224
90 b/w images
Binding: Hardback
Published by Schiffer Publishing – www.schifferbooks.com

B.A.Van Sise is a journalist and photographic artist focused on the intersection between language and the visual image. His previous monograph: the visual poetry anthology Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry with Mary-Louise Parker was published in 2019.

Van Sise’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Center for Creative Photography, the Center for Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, as well as in group exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art; a number of his portraits of American poets are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. To learn more about his visual and written work, please visit https://bavansise.format.com/

About Cary Benbow

Photographer, Writer, Publisher of Wobneb Magazine

View all posts by Cary Benbow →

Location: Online Type: Black and White, Book Review, Portraits

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