photobooth; some of us did not die; a conspiracy of decency

[December 4th, 2002] photobooth
by Babbette Hines
(Princeton, 224 pages, $19.95)

Like a lost album belonging to Nino Quincampoix in Amélie, Babbette Hines' collection of photobooth portraits is a delightful and moving record of 75 years
of self-photography.

Like the character of Quincampoix, Hines has combed through trash and forgotten boxes to discover discarded images of men and women, both earnest and hammingly theatrical, that have crowded into the world's million photobooths to reproduce their faces on four little squares.

Here are the first customers from the '20s: natty, hatted men and cloche-headed women still turning in profile as if they were at a professional photography studio. Then the spread of booths during the Depression creates a more democratic collection of people--hardscrabble farmers and their marcelled wives escaping woes
at a county fair or for a night on the town. The '40s are marked by the profusion of smiling sailors and soldiers, most unwittingly creating memento mori.

Hines provides a wonderful introduction to the photobooth, which was invented in 1925 by a Siberian immigrant named Anatol Josepho who felt that everyone should be able to afford a portrait. Paid $1 million for his creation in 1927, Josepho, a socialist, immediately gave half the money to charity.

The photobooth was at its zenith from World War II to the late '50s, then began a slow slide from grace once the Polaroid camera had been introduced. But the latest craze of photo-stickers is breathing new life into Josepho's brainchild.

With a preface by another great aficionado of collecting, Lawrence Weschler (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Photobooth is a marvelous book that leads us to recognize the beauty and transcendence in the ordinary. Steffen Silvis

some of us did not die
by June Jordan
(Basic Books, 308 pages, $26)

Professor of African-American studies, author of countless books of poems and frequent political magazine commentator, June Jordan died this summer after a decades-long battle with breast cancer.

It was a struggle she helped politicize in 1996 when she wrote of this "soft-spoken emergency" that she hoped would become "the number-one-on-the-tip-of-the-tongue issue all kinds of people join to eradicate, this afternoon/tonight/Monday morning." Her entire career, which spanned more than half a century, was infused with this sense of personal urgency as political necessity.

Some of Us Did Not Die is a collection of her essays, organized in reverse chronological order. The organization of the essays allows a reader to see through Jordan's own thought process, to see history literally devolve through her perspective. But the collection, as much autobiography as anthology of one woman's political writings, highlights the ways that Jordan's passionate voice never lost its power over the years.

Though time clearly calmed much of Jordan's rage, her commitment to achieving social understanding was as vociferous in a talk she gave about Sept. 11 and its aftermath year (while battling breast cancer) as it was reporting to a friend on the state of Harlem during the race riots in 1964 (while trying to raise a family as a single mother).

Throughout, Jordan sprinkles her essays with poetry and constantly uses and promotes a language of action in hopes of reaching a choir of historical mutes, the minority races, genders and sexual orientations that must fight everyday for survival within a white-male-dominated world. Though the title is a reminder that Jordan herself did not survive her final battle, the collection serves as a call to us to take up from where her work left off. Kim Colton

a conspiracy of decency
by Emmy E. Werner
(Westview Press, 212 pages, $26)

The rescue of Danish Jews from deportation to the Nazi death camps in World War II was one of few success stories in the otherwise bleak history of the Holocaust. More than 7,000 Jews escaped from occupied Denmark to neutral Sweden in October 1943, aided by fellow Danes who hid and fed them before sneaking them onto fishing boats that would carry them across the Oresund.

Yet there are several troubling aspects of Denmark's occupation that author Emmy Werner seems to glide over as she describes the "conspiracy of decency" that made the Danish Jews' escape possible.

Before and after the occupation, the Danish government actively shielded Jews from German harassment, but only Danish Jews. From 1933 on, Denmark, like most European countries, maintained a highly restrictive refugee policy that no doubt vastly contributed to the overall Jewish death toll. The rescue of the Danish Jews was indeed heroic, but it was also immensely profitable: Danish fishermen and other boat captains charged Jews upwards of 1,000 kroner a head--hundreds of dollars--for passage to Sweden (Adolph Meyer, the well-known head doctor of a Copenhagen children's hospital, paid 10,000). Fortunately, resistance members, many of them energetic, idealistic teenagers, canvassed the country for private donations to fund the secret exodus.

Counterbalancing the brave efforts of the resistance, however, was the surprising number of Danish men who enlisted in the Frikorps Denmark, an SS-trained corps that fought alongside the Germans on the Eastern front. As Werner mentions in passing, nearly half of the 8,000 Danes who volunteered for the Frikorps died fighting the Russians, more than Denmark's total losses against the Germans. Matt Buckingham