Multiply by Six Million: A Personal Perspective on the Holocaust

Portraits of Survivors from the Legacy Project by Evvy Eisen

October 1 – November 20, 2005
(de Saisset Museum presentation)

September 19 – December 16, 2005 (Orradre Library presentation)

Multiply by Six Million is a powerful new photography exhibition that provides a local and personal perspective on the tragedy of the Holocaust. The exhibition showcases Inverness-based photographer Evvy Eisen’s decade-long project to create portraits of Holocaust survivors living in the Bay Area and Europe and to collect their personal histories. The project now includes 200 works, approximately 50 of which will be included in this exhibition (in a collaborative exhibition, approximately 30 works will be shown at the de Saisset Museum and approximately 17 will be featured at Santa Clara University’s Orradre Library). Each work in the exhibition includes a dramatic black-and-white portrait and an edited version of the subject’s own description of his/her experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. The Legacy Project has been critically lauded and is included in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, France.

By featuring individual survivor portraits and stories, Multiply by Six Million offers viewers a personal perspective on the Holocaust. Photographer Eisen hopes that through this personal connection, we truly understand the Holocaust and thereby prevent it from ever happening again.