Simon Hill HonFRPS for The Fed My Voice

The portraits presented here were photographed by Simon Hill HonFRPS while working on Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors, a project commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in association with the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Photographic Society. Simon photographed twelve survivors from the Greater Manchester area, creating a series of intimate black-and-white portraits.

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Never part of the Generations commission, nor created specifically for the My Voice project, this series of close-up black-and-white portraits in square format, were only intended to be a personal project. However, the quiet dignity and directness of the portraits resonated strongly with the aims of the initiative, and they were subsequently adopted to form part of the visual identity of the My Voice project. The portraits provide a powerful human presence alongside the written testimonies, connecting personal memory with collective history.​

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“Sitting and talking with each survivor, I was humbled by the weight and resilience of their lives. My camera was simply a way to hold that moment, to let their presence speak for itself. I chose a close, very direct portrait so that nothing would distract from the person in front of the camera. What matters in these photographs is the presence of the individual and the history they carry.”   Simon Hill CPhot HonFRPS