Photo fillings

I felt that I was at a point where I wanted to do something with the remaining parts of my life to contribute in a way that I couldnt in dentistry, said Shaffer,61,whose latest project is an ambitious endeavour to tell a unique history of Los Angeles.

Photographing and interviewing elderly immigrants,Shaffer has been documenting the story of Los Angeles through the eyes and voices of people who came to the city decades ago from all corners of the globe.

I am calling the project Quiet Heroes Over 80 because I see how heroic they have been, said Shaffer. They beat long odds just to immigrate to the USand they have been what America is all about.

The experience of many of those aging immigrants has been typified by people like 82-year-old Alisa Cohen,the daughter of an economist and a bacteriologist in the pre-World War II Soviet army. Cohen lost touch with her parents,who lived in fear of KGB spies,after war broke out. She spent the war years living out of a backpack as she tried making her way to Stalingrad.

The Germans had Messerschmitts fighter planes, Cohen remembered of her time spent avoiding being strafed by German aircraft,their cannon and machine guns blazing. Even today when I hear two planes together,I still feel the terror and run.

What followed was a marriage at age 17 to a much older man in Uzbekistan,relocations to Poland and Israel,a divorce,remarriage to an American and eventually a move to the San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s where her second husband died of cancer.

Widowed with two daughters,Cohen learned English,became a nanny and began teaching piano to students in the Valleyamong them Shaffers wife,Barbara.

She spent so many years living there under poverty,eating nothing but potatoes for three or four years,so she has an appreciation for the life she has made for herself here, said Barbara Shaffer.

Cohen said the basics in life alone make her happy. People who are born here already do not understand the meaning of just the basics, she said. I am happy if I have a roof over my head because for six years I had no roof. If I am hungry,I have food. For six years I dreamt of a small morsel of bread.

Other subjects in the project include an 86-year-old Greek man; an 88-year-old Filipino who was a WWII prisoner of war; an 88-year-old Polish woman who risked her life to save Jews during the Holocaust; and a 94-year-old Japanese woman who was incarcerated in the Manzanar Internment Camp in the Owens Valley during World War II.

Black-and-white photographs of these and other immigrants in the project,as well as videotaped interviews will be on display in April in Los Angeles.

For Barry Shaffer,the project has also represented a personal review of his own familys immigrant roots. Shaffers grandparents had immigrated in the 1920s. The family ran a general store and attended a local synagogue.

Theres no doubt that a lot of this touches on the sentimentality of my own familys immigration here and some of the hardships they encountered, said Shaffer. It takes an enormous amount of energy against an enormous amount of odds to immigrate to the US, he said. Whether it be economic disadvantage or religious disadvantage,once they got here,they created good lives for themselves.

Telling these stories,said Shaffer,was why he knew the career change was the right decision.

Its pretty exciting being involved in a career of photographybeing attached to the world,being involved in peoples lives, he said. And its a different way of being able to make a difference.

NYT Syndicate