From the author's Introduction:
Purim, Jerusalem, 1978: My first photograph, in the heart of Jerusalem, in the Mea Shearim quarter – an identical reproduction of a prewar eastern European village. Krakow or Jerusalem, eastern Europe or Israel? What intuition led me toward this frozen ballet, in which I felt I saw the form of the archetypal Jew? My journey began with this picture, although I did not realize it at the time. Mea Shearim proved to be the start of this reverse odyssey from “the promised land,” an odyssey that would lead me, over a period of twenty-five years, from Sarajevo to Calcutta, from Rome to New York, gathering and assembling the multiple fragments of exile.
Initially, I traveled to Tunisia, Morocco, India, Ethiopia, and Yemen, investigating the many reconfigurations of Israel among the nations of the world. In 1983, I set off for central Asia. It was just before perestroika; no one suspected the changes that were about to come. Confronted with such a rich human landscape, I decided to record the traces of a people spread across fifteen republics, and I returned to the Soviet Union again and again. Almost simultaneously, I began photographing the Marranos in Portugal. Then I followed the peregrinations of the Sephardim across some twenty countries, from Europe to Asia and the New World.
How does one identify Jewishness? What are its signs? At first, I took the archaic, the tribal – that is, the traditional – to represent “authentic” Jewishness: the black border on the men's trousers in Jerba, in memory of the destruction of the Temple; or else, in Abyssinia, the pre-Talmudic custom of women's huts, where Jewish women confine themselves during menstruation. Or the lintel of doorways, in India, bearing the mark of a hand steeped in the blood of a lamb in memory of the last plague in Egypt …. I felt that only when these various – and often dissonant – elements were considered together could we truly glimpse klal Israel – the community of Israel.
But the more I progressed, the more I was forced to abandon the myth of “One People.” I was searching for what I believed in: continuity. I found only discontinuity. And the more Jews I met, the less I understood what a Jew looked like…. As I became more conscious of my reliance on the trappings of Judaism, I started to look at identity, too, as a construction. And as I found a much broader spectrum of expressions and representations of Judaism, I began juxtaposing and compressing the documentary material that I had collected in succinct, multilayered photographs. In a double movement consisting of adding and reducing, the document became an image.
For over twenty-five years the French-born Brenner has sought out and photographed every corner of Jewish life across six continents, compiling over 80,000 negatives in the process. Originally trained as a cultural anthropologist, Brenner saw his picture-making strategy evolve dramatically over this period, from a documentary stance in the earlier years, towards a more constructed approach to image-making in the most recent decade. The results of Brenner's extraordinary journey have garnered him the prestigious Prix de Rome as well as solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York; the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles; the Brooklyn Museum; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne.
art2art is proud to present Diaspora: Photographs of Jewish Homelands in Exile by Frédéric Brenner – an exhibition that is at once timely and timeless, crowd-pleasing and thought-provoking. In Brenner's words once again, “The photographs enable us to see and acknowledge the multiple threads from which we are woven, to listen to and acknowledge the multiple voices within us, even when paradoxical and discordant.”
A lavish two-volume slip-covered book, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, is available. |
