"Multiply by Six Million - Portraits and Stories of Holocaust Survivors"

Evvy Eisen is a photographer and teacher in the San Francisco Bay area. She specializes in environmental portraits, often involving socially relevant issues. Eisen began the Legacy: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors project in 1992. The project is meant to “create images of human courage, stamina and creativity born of the most desperate circumstances.” Eisen met with each survivor three times, in order to know them and their personal histories. During these visits, she photographed them in black and white silver gelatin prints, in their home and utilizing natural light. Accompanied with each portrait is a biography, which details the hardships that each survivor had to face during the Holocaust. Multiply by Six Million - Portraits and Stories of Holocaust Survivors, formerly entitled "Legacy: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors" was a project began by Evvy Eisen in 1992, which sought to photograph Holocaust survivors and accompany their portraits with a biography of their life during the Holocaust. The portraits are taken in black and white silver gelatin prints. While most of the portraits are 11"x14", some of the later portraits are 8"x11." The biographies are generally several pages long, and tell the stories of each individual’s story through the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum accepted Eisen’s first donation in 1995, and accepted donations annually until 2006. The Legacy: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors collection consists of two series: biographies and portraits. The biographies series contains all the biographical histories that are meant to accompany the portraits of the survivors. Each biography is generally several pages long and written by the survivors themselves. The biographies are arranged by year, and individual survivors can be linked to their portraits in series two. The portraits series contains mainly large, mounted 11x14 silver gelatin black and white portraits of Holocaust survivors. The 2004 portraits are not mounted, and the 2005 and 2006 portraits are 8x11. The portraits are arranged annually, with each box containing one year of photographs, with the exception of boxes 11 and 12. The portraits are arranged within each box alphabetically by last name. Each name can be found in the container list below. The accompanied biographies can be found in series one, in the folder of the matching year. Copyright Holder: Evvy Eisen