To commemorate Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in Bristol is opening Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, a partnership undertaking that includes 50 images of various survivors everywhere in the world.

“The exhibition was meant to open in 2020 with 75 portraits to mark the seventy fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” mentioned Tracy Marshall-Grant, RPS Venture Curator, over e mail. When the UK was positioned below its first nationwide lockdown like so many different international locations in March 2020, the exhibition was up to date and postponed till this 12 months.

Opening Thursday, the present options photographs taken by 13 completely different photographers, together with photographs taken by Kate Middleton aka Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cambridge. The RPS labored with companions together with Holocaust Memorial Day Belief to pair survivors and their households with the photographers. Every photographer was inspired to deal with the undertaking as if it had been their very own, leading to pictures of various kinds.

Whereas a choose few pictures had been taken previous to Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2020, many of the pictures exhibited as a part of this show had been taken within the spring of 2021. To guard susceptible survivors and their households, each sitters and photographers had been double vaccinated in opposition to COVID-19 earlier than picture shoots befell. Photographers additionally labored in gardens and altered images digitally to make sure that the folks within the pictures had been in a position to preserve social distancing when obligatory.

When Zigi Shipper and 20 of his members of the family had been photographed by Arthur Edwards, photographs had been taken in intervals over a two-hour time interval, then stitched collectively to make sure that not more than six folks had been gathered in Shipper’s backyard at one time. One in all Shipper’s granddaughters who relies in Spain wasn’t in a position to attend the shoot because of journey restrictions, however her portrait was stitched in from afar.

The folks in these photographs are older, so this is likely to be the final time that they are photographed in such massive numbers. Grant mentioned that the exhibition was led to for this very purpose: To show and share the very highly effective tales by the survivors. The pictures present how their lives and legacies are being handed down the generations, reminding us collectively how necessary it’s that they’re remembered.