Silent Places : Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe

Jeff Gusky, a doctor of emergency medicine decided, at the age of 42, that he wanted to better confront the reality of modern Jewish history.

A self-taught photographer who subsequently learned to make museum quality prints, he "bought a good, journalist-type camera and some lenses" and travelled to Poland-once the home of the largest concentration of Diaspora Jews." He read the instruction manuals on the plane en route.

Four trips later, accompanied each time by a top Polish guide, he travelled through the country, beyond the city ghettos and the sites of concentration camps, into remote villages where Jews had lived and worked for almost 1000 years before the Holocaust-capturing on film the austere landscapes and the remains of a once thriving Jewish culture.;The doleful, understated clarity of what he saw and photographed capture a poignant sense of loss-making at the same time a connection to the past.