AUTHOR TALK WITH JACK MONTGOMERY

Jack Montgomery is a photographer based in Freeport, Maine. He has been making images since the early 1990’s. His subjects have ranged widely. His first major series of portraits was focused on Maine’s Holocaust survivors. He has since gone on to photograph New York Firefighters after 9/11, transgender youth, judges, villagers in the Dominican Republic, and dancers in Portland,Maine and Sienna, Italy among others. Montgomery says “This book has its origins more than 30 years ago, when I began photographing Maine’s Holocaust survivors. I had been stunned when I learned about Anne Frank at age 9, and remained acutely aware of the Holocaust and the scourge of antisemitism ever since. I began photographing seriously when I turned 40. After a few years learning the basics, I conceived my first project — photographing the faces of the people who had endured and survived the horrors of the Shoah. I listened carefully as we made the portraits together and heard their stories of rich lives before Hitler took power, the horrible experiences during the ensuing years, and then the remaking of their lives in Maine. Those portraits became an exhibition that was shown in many venues across the state. They now reside as permanent exhibits at the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland and the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine in Augusta. For many years, I wished that someone would memorialize their stories in a book, and let them be told by the survivors in the first person. Finally, at the outset of the pandemic, I realized that if anyone was going to make that book, it would be me. “If not now, when? If not me, who?” The five years that followed have shown a frightening resurgence of antisemitism throughout the world, including the United States and even Maine. My sense of urgency increased over the time it took to complete it. Now, in 2026, I am reading daily about antisemitic violence as well as hateful anti-Jewish tropes creeping into the mainstream of political discourse. This book is my response. In particular, I hope that young people will read these stories and realize that there is such a thing as truthful history, that words have consequences, and that violence is not a video-game, but rather the imposition of pain and death upon our fellow human beings. These stories are the responses of those who endured the most terrible consequences of hateful rhetoric and actions. I read them as their warning to all of us.”

This program is free and open to all.