new york | A man with a chiseled face and Roman profile gazes into the light amid a roomful of Greco-Roman busts that could be of his ancestors.
Photojournalist Frederic Brenner, during a recent interview, stops to point at one black-and-white image of a young Italian Jew whose visage seemed to morph into the marble statues. “This capacity of becoming ‘the other’ — this is what the whole project is about,” he says.
The project Brenner is referring to is “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile,” a two-volume set of photographs and essays. In many ways, it encapsulates his life’s work. The photographer will be appearing in the Bay Area early next month to speak about his latest opus.
Brenner’s new work surfaces at a crucial moment — a few months after the release of the National Jewish Population Survey, a $6 million study said to provide the most comprehensive statistical snapshot of U.S. Jewry ever.
The photographer’s art captures something facts and figures cannot, says Egon Mayer, a noted sociologist whose 2001 survey of American Jewish identity was widely seen as a benchmark study. Brenner “can do artistically what we social scientists are trying to do by asking 1,000 questions.”
Moreover, Brenner “is trying to capture a complexity that Jewish institutional organizations are uncomfortable with,” Mayer adds.
Brenner, 44, is the controversial chronicler of world Jewry who for 25 years roamed five continents living with and photographing indigenous Jews — from Azerbaijan to Yemen, from Brooklyn to Jerusalem.
His images, such as a roomful of Groucho Marx impersonators, a chapter of Harley-Davidson riders and a table of semi-naked women displaying their mastectomy scars, have already brought his name to the coffee tables of many American Jews.
Some of those images, originally published in “Jews/America/A Representation” in 1996, opened a debate over the nature of his new form of Jewish documentary.
“These are not photographs either of or for comfortable Jews,” Mayer claims, but ones that unearth “the layered personae” of American Jewry.
However, author and commentator Leon Wieseltier, writing in The New Republic, noted that “Brenner’s pictures adore themselves. They believe themselves to be fresh, shocking, paradoxical, controversial. See how they blow the lid off American Jewish identity and go behind the conventions of American Jewish existence and boldly reveal it to be riddled [with irony].”
For Brenner, his pictures have always represented “the enigma of identity” for Jews.
“At first,” he writes, “I took the archaic, the tribal — that is, the traditional — to represent ‘authentic’ Jewishness.” Later, “as I became more conscious of my reliance on the trappings of Judaism, I started to look at identity, too, as a construction. …At the origin of every photograph in this book, there is a story.”
He points to one photo in particular, from the Soviet Union in 1983. Brenner saw beyond the stereotypical Iron Curtain of urban refuseniks by trekking to then-unmapped Central Asian republics, among the first Western photographers allowed in. In Azerbaijan, he found mustachioed Jewish men in a local teahouse looking exactly like their countrymen.
“Jews take the shape and color of where they are. All identities are invented, even ours,” he says.
His mission to explore that identity began in 1978, when Brenner, then 18, the assimilated son of parents living in France, launched his own search for identity with a trip to Israel. His maternal grandparents came from Algeria and his paternal grandparents from Romania and Ukraine, assembling a familial “puzzle” he’s been piecing together since.
His photographic journey — illuminated by Brenner’s writings as well as contributions from Jacques Derrida. Julius Lester, Carlos Fuentes and others — is a 12-year marathon to more than 80 countries driven by a desire to record communities of “vanishing” Jews. He includes Israel in the diaspora because “the dimension of exile is omnipresent,” he writes. In Israel, refugees from diverse regions —Eastern Europe’s Chassidic communities or Yemen — have grappled with maintaining their cultural identities.
Outside of Israel, whether it was in Ethiopia or Uzbekistan, he found “an incredible reservoir” of Jewish culture intertwined with other worlds, and he was determined to unravel that thread before it disintegrated.
One haunting image came from a community of rural Yemenite Jews. A grandfather reads a Jewish text with his young grandson.
Years later he found that boy, a teenager named Mazal — Hebrew for “fortune” — in an Israeli absorption center. Mazal, then 16, along with his 14-year-old wife and infant daughter, are transplanted to Israel, but they seem hardly changed outwardly.
Today that baby girl is 12. She lives with her religious parents and four siblings in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rehovot. She loves to rollerblade.
Brenner embraces those stories of exile and home with a spiritual fervor of his own.
In one of his most charged photos, he shows Italian Jews at St. Peter´s Square outside the Vatican selling pictures of the pope.
“Not only didn’t they succumb to the temptation to idol worship — they are selling the idols,” he says.
But the more he sees, Brenner insists, the less he understands about the world´s Jews.