Ernest Kafka Photography

I was born in Vienna in December of 1932. The years between then and August 1938 were comfortable and privileged for me. On my mother's side, my grandmother was an extremely gifted pianist. Her home was filled with music, musicians and adopted dogs. My grandfather was a much respected doctor, as was my uncle who had traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East looking at works of art. He taught and inspired me with accounts of his exciting visual tours.

Despite the turmoil in Austria after World War I, when my father served on the Italian front and saw heavy fighting from age 16 to 20, he returned to Vienna and achieved success as a banker. The social and economic disorder in Austria loomed in the background. I became indistinctly aware of the dangers and of my parents & anxiety, but life for me was culturally and domestically comfortable.

After the Nazi invasion of Austria, my family was able to flee, and life changed considerably when we arrived in New York with no connection to the life here, having left relatives and friends behind. Even through this turmoil and great sense of loss, I was able to keep myself motivated, my youth filled with music and the love of art kept me alive with hope. I went to public school, kept playing the piano and distinguished myself enough in High School to be able to enter Harvard, then I went to Washington University St. Louis Medical School and finally I became a psychoanalyst. To paraphrase the words of Anais Nin, I didn't "escape into philosophy, psychology, and art" I went there to make my life a whole one.

In Vienna during my youth my mother held my hand in one of hers and carried a camera in the other. I began taking pictures using her Voigtlander probably at about the age of ten. In my later youth in New York, it was still possible to sneak into the subway, travel to Manhattan, and go to museums on the sly, which I did. The musical life also continued. The public library was full of books, and I read voraciously hidden under the covers after bedtime, using a dry battery and a self constructed miner's light.

Memories of the past are continually revised. In my case, about ten years ago, when important people in my life began to age and die, I photographed people whose images I wished to preserve, to remind me of how they had looked, and to make tangible and keep alive the important and vital relationships and experiences we had had together. I began to have more time to photograph, and to learn to make prints and enlargements.

As a psychoanalyst in practice for over four decades, my world was one of observing and listening to people, and working to help individuals find out more about themselves and to use these revelations, sometimes unbeknownst to them, to ameliorate their understanding of themselves and effect positive change in their lives. I found great rewards in this work. And in turn, this life of listening and observing helped me to hone and redefine my own sense of what makes of life worth living, no matter how difficult the struggle. Empathy and acceptance of the world as it is was as important to me as it was for my patients.

I met my wife Barbara at college. We share many interests. We have two children and now, two grandchildren. It is my dream that the love of art and music and interest in people and their pursuits, which for me are inexorably linked, will be with them through my work and the efforts of my wonderfully talented wife whose dedication to the culinary arts has made our family life so enjoyable and gives joy not only to our family, but to many others.

In capturing the images of beautiful places, the wonderful and mysterious relationships of people I know and don't know and even the quotidian and commonplace, photography gave me yet another connection to the persistence of memory, keeping my past alive and making my future a secure one. Secure because I know I can keep on pursuing this art form which doesn't depend on images imagined and created in just in my own mind, but which augments a view of the world that I have come to understand and accept and allows me to continue to look, to examine and to work to communicate and elicit emotional response.