‘Emotional palimpsest’

From Larry Volk’s show “re-cognition,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Sept. 2-27.

He explains:

“The impetus for this body of work came while watching my daughter and her high school friends celebrate her sixteenth birthday. At the time, I had been working with photographs from my mother's history as a Holocaust survivor in France, and I came upon an image that was deeply familiar to me: a class picture of my mother taken at about the same age.

“Suddenly, the class picture assumed a profoundly different meaning. I experienced a kind of emotional palimpsest, seeing my mother's image through the present-day experience of my daughter gathered with her friends. For the first time, I recognized that many of the girls pictured with my mother—her classmates in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, all about sixteen years old—were likely to have perished during the Holocaust.’’