CAMERA OBSCURA
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
DOWN BY THE SEA
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Technical Information
None of the following is set in stone.
THREE QUESTIONS
In no particular order.
1—The British intelligence officer and consular official Margaret Reid is best remembered for the work she undertook during the Allied evacuation of Norway in April 1940, an endeavour for which she was justly awarded an MBE by King George VI the following year. The fact that she's also known to have played an integral part in the saving of thousands of Jewish lives during her 22-month posting at the British Embassy in Berlin between November 1938 and August 1939, however, has for the most part been largely overlooked. Despite receiving a posthumous British Hero of the Holocaust award in 2018, unlike her boss Frank Foley, Ms. Reid has never been recognised as Righteous Among the Nations. Why? Can the story of Lina, Judith and David Balk's escape be helpful in any way with this question?
2—Alongside his more traditional duties facilitating the emigration of young Zionists from Lithuania to Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s, the British diplomat Thomas Preston is also said to have saved over 1,000 Jewish lives in 1940 by issuing a variety of unauthorised documents that allowed them to leave the country to a number of different destinations.1 Considering Klaipėda was one of the main centres of Zionist activity in Lithuania during the interwar period,2 how can Leon Balk's remarkable kibbutz hachshara photographs be used to uncover individual/personal stories that help explain exactly how Mr. Preston's work was carried out?
3—The naturalised British studio and portrait photographer Leon Balk was an exceptionally talented individual who spent the second half of his life inadvertently creating a hugely significant—and considerably scattered—historical archive after he returned to his native Lithuania. Produced over a period of about 15 years, his remarkable kibbutz hachshara photographs (see the link above ↑) are currently in the slow and tedious process of being identified, documented and digitally preserved in a unified location as part of the wider Camera Obscura project. How can his relatively small but equally important collection of family photographs, many of which arrived in the United Kingdom in Lina, Judith and David Balk's hand luggage after they escaped Nazi Germany in April 1939, be used to add further impact to the story of the Balks and the Bergmanns in general?
1 As with the similar story of the Sugihara visas, it seems that most of these documents were issued to non-Lithuanian Jews who'd recently escaped over the border from Nazi-occupied Poland.
2 In Building Bridges, published by the British Embassy Vilnius in 2019, a reference is made to Einar Hoepfner, who's recorded as having been working during the interwar period at the British Vice-Consulate in Klaipėda in the position of Honorary Vice-Consul. Although he was almost certainly preoccupied with his work at the United Baltic Corporation, it might be worth looking into his diplomatic responsibilities, including any dealings he may have had with the Balk family.
PROJECT OUTCOMES
PRIMARY
Illustrated standalone article/feature/piece on the Camera Obscura website about Lina, Judith and David Balk's escape to England set against a backdrop of Jewish life and culture in Klaipėda during the 1930s through the lens of Leon Balk's professional and family photographs
The partial/extended telling of the story through the production of an experimental biographical map
A greater awareness of the role played by the UK in the saving of Lithuanian and other Jews in the years immediately before the Second World War (through press coverage etc.)
SECONDARY
Exhibition if further funding can be found. Possibly something at the Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre in Glasgow and/or a relevant space in Lithuania
Combined/standalone public presentation
Bringing Martin Balk to Lithuania for the first time
METHODOLOGIES
Traditional desk research, especially into the miscellaneous details concerning Jewish life and culture in Klaipėda during the immediate period leading up to and including its occupation by Nazi Germany on March 23, 1939
Interviews with British diplomatic staff and members of the Balk family
Deep dive into Margaret Reid with a possible research visit to the Leeds University Library and a virtual visit to the Imperial War Museum to look through her archive
Find individual stories about Thomas Preston's work in Lithuania in 1940
BUDGET
UNKNOWN
Richard Schofield's fee/honorarium
Temporary membership of Israel Genealogy Research Association (€40)
Research trip to Leeds University Library
Donation to Jews in East Prussia (see Project Consultants ↓) in recognition of the organisation's contribution towards the project
SCHEDULE
Part-time over several weeks. I'd like to get started as soon as possible in order to have the project finished by October or November at the very latest, i.e. before the research and production for The Life & Times of Leon Balk is expected to begin.
ABOUT ME
Born in Crawley, England, on September 2, 1964, I'm a trained journalist and a former filmmaker, travel writer and documentary photographer who’s lived and worked in Lithuania since June 2001. Today, I’m a full-time photo historian and provenance researcher, specialising in all aspects of pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photography, photographers and photographs. Held at gunpoint twice—while filming on the Russian-Chinese border in November 1997, and again in a remote region in central Cuba almost a year to the day later—I'm the paternal grandson of the English pilot, author and wartime farmer, Harry Methuen Schofield.
EDUCATION
I was awarded an MA (with Distinction) on the groundbreaking Photojournalism & Documentary Photography programme at the London College of Communication in 2009 for a project shot in Lithuania on a ‘technically lamentable’ Nokia E61i mobile phone. Several photographs from this and other E61i projects were combined into the e-book, Nokumentary™, which was published in New York by Dutch Kills Press in March 2015.
EMPLOYMENT
I didn’t do very well at secondary school, and I consequently spent the first 10 years or so of my working life doing a variety of unskilled jobs from cleaning rich people's houses to working for a small removal and delivery company, most of which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Obsessed with films and filmmaking from an early age, in the late 1980s I began borrowing a friend’s video camera and started making my own low budget documentaries. In November 1998, I was commissioned by the UK public broadcaster Channel 4 to produce, shoot and edit five short films in Cuba that were broadcast every evening immediately after the Channel 4 News during the first week on 1999 as part of the channel's 40th anniversary commemoration of the Cuban Revolution. A chance meeting with a travel writer while researching a documentary film in Bucharest in October 1999 resulted in the offer of a job in Lithuania. In June 2001, I became Editor-in-Chief of the bi-monthly (and once legendary) Vilnius In Your Pocket print guide. I continued working for In Your Pocket as a freelance writer, editor, photographer and production manager in 11 European countries until September 2019.
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE (HIGHLIGHTS)
One the same day our MA group exhibition opened at the Printspace Gallery in London in March 2010, I was commissioned by a UK-based travel publisher to spend six weeks travelling and taking photographs in Russia, an adventure I wrote about for a British photography magazine the following year. Always more interested in other people's photographs than my own, I subsequently curated two small exhibitions of never-before-seen photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival in October 2012 and Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College in April 2013. Five months after the Cambridge exhibition, I accidentally stumbled upon a collection of just over 100 pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish family photographs that had been smuggled out of the Kovno Ghetto by an unknown person or persons in October 1943, an event that quite simply changed my life. The discovery generated an enormous amount of activity over the next few years, with highlights including a fascinating experimental music project, collectively known as The Kaunas Requiem, and a major exhibition I co-curated at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York in October 2018. Having failed to rescue and renovate an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas whilst simultaneously attempting to photograph every surviving former synagogue in Lithuania while hitchhiking around the country in August 2017 (read the combined adventure story here), I was asked to join an international project with Jewish organisations in Latvia and Sweden in which we devised a Jewish heritage travelling summer school, the first of which took place in July 2019, and that we continue to run every couple of years. Five years before we set off on our first travelling summer school, I established a public engagement-focused nonprofit organisation, the International Centre for Litvak Photography, that was responsible for several of the above projects, as well as 'Fifty Schools', a year-long informal education project funded by the Good Will Foundation during which myself and my colleague, Mariana Iljina, visited dozens (not quite 50) of high schools throughout Lithuania. After spending the first lockdown helping to look after my dying father in Eastbourne during the spring and early summer of 2020, I returned to Lithuania at the end of June, where I was awarded a small research grant from the Lithuanian Council for Culture that enabled me to begin a long-term investigation that gradually evolved into Camera Obscura, the first project managed by my new nonprofit organisation, the Data Brigade, that replaced the International Centre for Litvak Photography in May 2024. Camera Obscura (↓) was officially launched on January 1, 2025, and is still very much in the early stages of development. It's hoped that The Life & Times of Leon Balk will become its first in-depth micro-project.
EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS (HIGHLIGHTS)
November 2009—Daily Life Revisited A week-long solo exhibition inside a re-purposed shop in a Vilnius shopping centre as part of my MA final project. A small selection of photographs can be seen here.
March-April 2010—16 Photographers Daily Life Revisited (↑↓) in a group exhibition at the Printspace Gallery in London as part of my MA final project. A short piece about Daily Life Revisited by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.
October 2012—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival. A short piece about the Snapshot Citizens project by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.
April 2013—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies' Annual Congress at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College.
2014—Performance Without an Audience & Other Experiments A series of impromptu outdoor exhibitions and events in various Lithuanian towns and cities.
March 2015—Cemetery to Ghetto My last Performance Without an Audience was made into a short film.
September 2016—The Kaunas Requiem A week-long exhibition and live music recital inside an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas. Music from the project is here.
2018—Back to Shul Three very different exhibitions in Prienai, Kaunas and Vilnius. In partnership with the Lithuanian Jewish Community and others.
October 2018-April 2019—Lost & Found Yeshiva University Museum, New York. An article in Moment magazine is here.
March-April 2024—A Window to the Future Three nights of projections in the windows of the former ORT Technicum building in Wilno/Vilnius. In collaboration with the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library of Lithuania. With Mark Adam Harold (see also here). A short description is here.
PROJECT CONSULTANTS
Martin Balk
Born in Leicester in 1959. Lina Balk's grandchild. David Balk's son. A teacher of Motor Vehicle Studies at Totton College in Southampton, Martin Balk was the first person to carry out any significant research into the life and work of his grandfather, who passed away in Klaipėda two decades before he was born. Already working closely with me on the project in general, Martin is currently going through a box of his late father's possessions, and is liaising with other members of his family in the United Kingdom and the United States who also own useful and/or interesting knowledge (and photographs) concerning their family history.
Jews in East Prussia
Founded in 2004, Jews in East Prussia (Juden in Ostpreussen) is a German nonprofit organisation registered in Berlin and physically located in Klaipėda. The project is run by Dr. Ruth Leiserowitz, a Senior Researcher at Klaipėda University's Institute of History and Archaeology in the Baltic Region and the world's leading expert on the subject after which the organisation is named, and her husband, Michael, a former guide at the POLIN museum in Warsaw who holds dual German and Israeli citizenship.
CONTACT
If you have any questions about the project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Richard Schofield
Founding Editor
Camera Obscura
c/o The Data Brigade
Avižonio g. 5-1
Žagarė
84323
Lithuania
Tel. +37063016686
UK Address
23 Upperton Road
Eastbourne
East Sussex
BN21 1LY
Tel. +447760920661