Diaspora: Homelands in Exile: Photographs/voices: Photographs Vol 1 - Hardcover

Frederic Brenner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747571503 ISBN 13: 9780747571506

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2003

Synopsis

Since 1978, French photographer Frédéric Brenner has been chronicling the Jewish Diaspora by producing visual social histories of Jewish communities. Diaspora is a photographic record of his 25-year search for the Jewish population in 40 countries over five continents. Volume I, 344 pages, is a collection of 262 of Brenner's more than 80,000 photographs, the most extensive and diverse visual record of Jewish life ever created. A four page color insert includes two full-color photographs. Volume II is 164 pages of evocative essays by leading intellectuals on the meaning and significance to each of them of 60 of Brenner's photographs, reproduced here in smaller format. Diaspora is a landmark project that captures the scope and dynamism of one of the world's oldest, most diverse communities, and challenges stereotypes held by Jews and non-Jews alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederic Brenner, born in Paris in 1959, has a master's degree in social anthropology from the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. From Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Morocco to Ethiopia, Sarajevo to Jerusalem, he has spent twenty-five years chronicling the Jewish diaspora. He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York; the Rencontres Internationales de las Photographie, Arles; and the Musée De L'Elysée, Lausanne. Winner of the 1992 Prix de Rome, among other awards, Brenner has directed an original film, The Last Marranos, and has published several books, including Jerusalem: instants d'étérnite (1984), Israel (1988), Marranes (1992), Jews/America/Representation (1996), and Exile at Home (1998).

From Publishers Weekly:

If a group of eastern European Jews re-create their shtetl when they settle in Israel, then which place is home and which is exile? And while a secular Soviet general calls himself a Jew, and so does a man whose ancestors came to India almost 2,000 years ago, what, if anything, do they have in common? These are the kinds of questions provoked by Brenner's stunning collection of photographs, taken over the course of 25 years, chronicling Jewish lives, often in declining communities, in every corner of the world, from Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan to Ethiopia and Las Vegas. For anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who generally thinks of Jews in terms of Israel and the United States, the book will be a revelation. The images are full of surprises and ironies: contemporary Marranos in Portugal continue to celebrate Passover secretly, as they did during the Inquisition; a young Yemeni immigrant to Israel wears traditional sidelocks like his counterparts from eastern Europe; the men who sell Christian souvenirs in the piazza at St. Peter's in Rome are all Jewish. Brenner's images of women are particularly striking: six American breast cancer survivors are photographed shirtless; mothers of the desaparecidos in Argentina (of whom a disproportionate number were Jews) exhibit anguish and dignity; and a beautifully constructed photo presents a circular grouping of Holocaust survivors paired with their lesbian daughters. Brenner, who is French and has an advanced degree in anthropology, is well equipped to ponder (as he does in brief texts accompanying the photos in Vol. 2) the enigma of identity, its shifting nature in tension with a thread of continuity through time and space. Also accompanying his text are commentaries and personal reflections from writers and thinkers as diverse as Andre Aciman, Jacques Derrida and Julius Lester. Responding to a group portrait of men in a teahouse in Azerbaijan, Aciman sums up a paradox of the diaspora: "Why do they blend in so easily? Isn't it improbable how Jewish all Jews look." Of a group of Jewish barbers with their Muslim customers in Tajikistan, Brenner writes, "I wanted to show how these dhimmi Jews in Muslim lands successively embraced the Russian conquest and the Bolshevik revolution--which they believed would bring them emancipation but which instead confined them to professions such as shoe-mender and barber." This extraordinary volume is well worth it for the richness and variety of images, which will delight and sometimes perplex readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0747571503
• ISBN 13: 9780747571506
• Binding: Hardcover