Toronto Star, Canada

A picture and a thousand words

In donning the accoutrements of his family members, a photographer
engages in ‘honest acts of fakery’ to illuminate the nature of
identity

Sep 28, 2008 04:30 AM

Ryan Bigge
Special to the Star

This is Don Moises Rubinstein Krongold, herewith referred to as
Moises. Born in Ostrowiec, Poland, in 1902, Moises moved to Venezuela
in 1932 to try to make his fortune in the shmatte industry (shmatte
being Yiddish for rags or clothing). His plan was to earn a cool 10
grand, return to his homeland and set up his own store.

Meanwhile, his wife, Balbina, and their four-year-old daughter,
Esther, waited patiently for him to return. But by 1937 it seemed that
importing his family to Venezuela was a better decision, although only
after convincing the reluctant Balbina to leave her parents and
siblings behind.

Three years later, Moises and his family relocated to Santiago de
Chile, and in 1964, he moved into his daughter’s home after the
premature death of his wife. It was in this way that photographer
Rafael Goldchain (who moved to Canada in 1976) came to better know his
maternal grandfather.

As this photograph suggests, Moises was a sombre man with a penchant
for fedoras. Inside the bundle he’s clutching is some clothing, and if
you look closely, you’ll notice the unidentifiable items are wrapped
in a Spanish newspaper.

It is said that if you remain married long enough, you will start to
resemble your spouse.

An equally discomfiting prospect is that we all become our parents
eventually. In his new collection of photographs, I Am My Family,
Goldchain has decided to take such sentiments literally.

Which is to say that my opening paragraph contains an untruth. This
photograph is actually a self-portrait of Goldchain pretending to be
his late grandfather Moises (hence its full title: Self-Portrait as
Don Moises Rubinstein Krongold (b. Ostrowiec, Poland, 1902,
d. Cuernavaca, México 1980)).

Goldchain’s series of images evokes Nikki S. Lee, a New York artist
who disguised herself through clothing and makeup in order to
infiltrate a variety of ethnic and social groups (including punks,
Hispanics, senior citizens and yuppies) for a series entitled
Projects.

But unlike Lee, Goldchain has a genetic basis for his acts of
subterfuge, making his work a more honest act of fakery.

As you might guess, a key inspiration for this project was Goldchain’s
desire to better understand his Jewish roots. Due to the horrors of
World War II, most notably the Shoah, locating adequate source
material about the various branches of his family tree, be that
photographs or even basic genealogical information, was often
difficult. (As Goldchain writes in his artist statement, "I use the
word Shoah here because the more common term Holocaust has been
adopted to designate other catastrophes such as the Armenian genocide,
and in the process has been emptied of its original Jewish
specificity.")

The 40-page appendix in My Family includes the sketchbooks, original
family photographs, notes, brainstorms, production stills and family
trees that Goldchain used to develop his images. In some cases, this
allows the viewer to compare and contrast Goldchain’s version of his
relatives with the original photograph.

Goldchain also believes, however, that we all resort to some
historical revisionism when we flip through family albums. For him, My
Family is about "how we transform the past when we bring it into the
present and how we construct ourselves in relation to our familial
past."

In certain cases, Goldchain not only transformed the past but also
invented it outright. A photograph of Doña Reizl Goldszajn Rozenfeld,
whose long curly hair resembles a macramé plant hanger, was inspired
by a wig he found. From this prop, Goldchain created "a middle-aged,
stylish woman suffering from chronic, mild depression ` there is one
in every family."

Whether the relative in question is real or imagined, Goldchain’s work
necessitates an uncanny resurrection of the dead. Not only does he
walk a mile in the shoes of Moises, but he also totters about in the
heels and skirts of his female relatives, including the non-existent
Reizl Goldszajn, along with the very real Sarah Gitl Ryten, Fela
Baumfeld Szpiegel and Balbina Baumfeld Szpiegel de Rubinstein
(great-great grandmother, aunt and aforementioned grandmother,
respectively). These photographs demonstrate that while Goldchain is
not a squeamish cross-dresser, he is a rather ugly woman.

Goldchain himself might agree with such an assessment. Despite, or
because of, the makeup, hair, costumes, studio lighting and digital
manipulations required, the final portraits contain an intentional
kind of artifice. With the photograph of Moises seen here, this
"fakeness" is not apparent.

But seeing portrait after portrait of the same person, My Family
becomes less about the art of transformation and more about how
viewers are asked to flit between Goldchain and the relative he is
trying to embody, a process akin to the famous figure-ground illusion
of the white vase that also contains two faces in profile that lurk in
the black background.

(A collection of images from My Family is on display at David Mirvish
Books until Oct.14.)

Although primarily an exploration of identity and the photographic
trickery the living are able to play on the dead, My Family also
tweaks the visual tropes of portrait photography. After the final
digital calibrations are completed, each of these images was "printed
onto photographic colour paper, resulting in subtly tinted,
monochromatic prints that emulate the look of early-20th-century
formal family-portrait photographs." This process imbues the pictures
with some historical verisimilitude (at least in a visual sense) while
at the same time reinforcing the staged nature of all portrait
photography.

Despite assistance from various hairpieces, costumes and the magic of
Photoshop, the success of these portraits hinges on Goldchain’s
ability to channel and reflect a variety of emotions and dispositions
through his eyes and face. He is as skilled an actor as he is a
photographer.

In another self-portrait of Moises, based on a photograph that
Goldchain himself took a year before his grandfather passed away, we
see sad, watery eyes, ravaged by a stroke and blurred by cataracts.

"As I raised my camera to photograph him, he stared at me with a
mixture of longing and disapproval," Goldchain writes. "One eye stared
hard at me in a seemingly critical way, the other had a soft and
melancholic look."

Goldchain is able to recreate the wistful regret and reproach of his
late grandfather. Through the eyes of the artist, a new window opens
into the soul of the dearly departed.