Artists featured in the monthly Member Spotlight are selected from our online Members' Gallery. If you wish to be considered for the Spotlight in the future, send us a note! Loli Kantor was kind enough to share her work and words with us this year...
Loli Kantor - March 2026
I was born in Paris, France in 1952 and grew up in the United States from 1956 to 1960 and Israel between 1960 and 1984. I immigrated to the United States and have been living in Fort Worth, Texas since 1984.
I loved photography, both still photography and films. I was especially drawn to photojournalism, documentary photography, and portraiture. I have an urge to photograph what and who I love. Since I love people, music and visual arts, my natural tendency drew me to want to photograph musicians, actors, dancers and performers in general. This is where my photography started. I best express myself in photography as I cannot draw or paint or write stories.
I have been a member of TPS for about eleven years. I started practicing photography about 20 years ago and joined the Texas Photographic Society to become a part of a wider photographic community. I have since participated in entries and shows and have been collecting members’ works in the TPS Members' Print Program.
ART, COMMUNITY AND INSPIRATIONS
I’ve always enjoyed documenting my life – at home, with the art community events I attended and on a month trip to Mali as a volunteer in 1998. I was a part of the Fort Worth art community, My husband was a musician, my daughter danced ballet and other… I photographed this world of my life before beginning documenting the Hip Pocket Theatre.
in 2001, I went to DoubleTake Documentary workshop at Hampshire college in Amherst, MA and took masterclasses by Mary Ellen Mark, Fredrick Wiseman, Ira Glass and others. After this highly inspirational experience I decided to quit my 30 year career as a rehab based physical therapist and make a career change into full time photography.
During this time I became the Hip Pocket Theatre’s resident photographer and also worked with other arts organizations such as the Bruce Wood Dance Company, Texas Ballet Theater, and other theatre companies in Austin and abroad. I also worked as a stringer for the Fort Worth Star Telegram and for the Van Cliburn Foundation.
In 2001, I was a founding member of Group F8, led by Christopher Blay. Around that time I decided to take an independent study class at TCC Northeast Campus. Inspiring to be around other photographers in the evening classes and studying with Peter Feresten and Richard Doherty, who became a lifelong inspiration to me, as did Mary Ellen Mark and documentary Film maker Fred Weisman.
BEYOND THE FOREST
I began a personal project in 2004 while traveling to East Central Europe and documenting the Jewish Presence and absence there after and the Holocaust the fall of the Soviet regime. This project began with a personal viewpoint as my parents were survivors of the Holocaust and lost their entire families. I traveled to research their families and their whereabouts in Poland. I then continued with more general viewpoint in Ukraine where I found more living survivors and their caregivers. I wanted to see how the Jewish communities who survived live there.
This project evolved over a 10 year period and was published in 2014 by the University of Texas Press Beyond The Forest, Jewish Communities in Eastern Europe, 2004-2012, after a self-published book entitled There Was a Forest in 2009. Simultaneously I was working on personal archives, left by my father. I made new work while traveling to the many places mentioned in his writings and in the documents I uncovered. I lost both of my parents at a young age : My mother 2 hours after my birth and my father when I was 14 years old. These losses weighed heavily on me throughout my life and resulted in my book: Call Me Lola. In Search of Mother, published by Hatje Cantz in 2024.
CALL ME LOLA
Call Me Lola began with my need to put together the pieces of my life story, which was filled with loss from a very young age. My mother died in childbirth having me in Paris in 1952. I was named after my mother Lola. I stayed with a nanny in Paris until I was 9 months old and was returned to my father in Tel Aviv then. When I was 14, my father died suddenly at the age of 50. I moved to live with relatives and was separated from my brother. Years later at the age of 50, my brother died suddenly. Call Me Lola was created with my mother taking the front stage of the story as I felt that without her nothing will be. I wanted to learn who she was to research in my own creative process.
The pain of these three losses followed me throughout my life. I used archives of documents and photographs along with present-day photographs I made for the project. The main subject of love, memory, loss and grief have a strong presence throughout the book and they move from past to present in a non-linear way, not in a chronological way.
Dr. Nissan Perez, former chief curator photography at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, wrote an in-depth introduction essay about memory and photography and curated the work in the book. Curator and art historian Danna Heller, my daughter, conducted an interview with me about some of the key images in the book and the history behind the work.
ABOUT LOLI
Loli Kantor is a widely exhibited artist in the United States and internationally. Her work is included in museum collections including The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, Poland), Lishui Museum of Photography (Lishui, China), Lviv National Museum (Lviv, Ukraine).
Kantor’s work has garnered critical acclaim in such publications as The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, LensWork, as well as Public Radio International. She has been awarded numerous accolades including Top 50 at Critical Mass, Photolucida (2010), Finalist in 2023, and the Award of Excellence at Lishui International Photography Festival (2009).