Cell, Auschwitz, Poland

Judy Glickman Lauder began making photographs in the 1970s, studying at UCLA, the Maine Photographic Workshop, and the Portland School of Art. Lauder’s father, Irving Bennet Ellis, was a noteworthy Pictorialist photographer working in California during the 1930s and 1940s, and his engagement with the medium inspired Lauder in her own pursuits. She has traveled extensively with camera in hand, making photographs that resonate with a deeply felt sense of place, a sensibility heightened by her use of only natural or available light. The artist's command of photography’s quintessential formal elements, light and shadow, is apparent in this photograph, in which rays emanating through a window cast a haunting spotlight on the traces of human suffering scratched into the walls of a cell at Auschwitz. In the early 1990s, Lauder’s longstanding work documenting sites of the Holocaust led her to an important commission from the Danish government to make portraits of survivors and rescuers.