I’m often asked why I got into photography.  I’ve always been drawn to photos, as a teenager I used to pour over my mothers childhood photos, my mother grew up in Paris and her photos had a timeless quality to them and it gave me a glimpse of the young woman she was before she became my mom.  On the other hand my father had no photos of his childhood, he grew up in war-torn Russia, orphaned at 5, brought up by an uncle, there was no place for photos. At one point, when I was about 10, a family photo of my father’s was discovered, in it were my father’s parents, his brother and a young girl, a sister that I never knew he had.  It was very emotional to be able to picture the grandparents I never met and see my father as a young boy.  That is what photos do, they are a moment in time, frozen, to be preserved and shared throughout generations.

The reason I’m bringing this up now is that yesterday I got a call from a client telling me that her mother had passed on.  She was calling to tell me that the photos I took at her son’s Bar Mitzvah in August were the last thing her mother was able to see and that in the past few months, seeing her mother in pain she got great comfort from the photos I took of her mother at the Bar Mitzvah.

Gabriella Grossberger  Z”L  –  1928-2009

The Bar Mitzvah Boy

His beautiful nieces, the great-grandchildren.