The Photographic Journey of Frederic Brenner
Moment Magazine, June 2004
Jennie Rothenberg

Frederic Brenner has peered through his camera lens at a vast assortment of Jewish faces. He has traveled to Ethiopian mountain ranges, dusty Indian courtyards, Russian factories and Florida beaches, playing out his unique quest for Jewish identity. “Am I a Jewish photographer?” muses Brenner, a handsome man with salt and pepper hair. “No. I’m a Jew and I’m a photographer. I happen to have discovered this need to unveil something about who I am.”

Brenner’s project culminated last fall with the publication of his two volume boxed set Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. The book represents Brenner’s 25 years of travel in some forty countries around the world. In each locale, Brenner, who holds a Masters degree in anthropology, lived with local Jewish communities and observed their rituals through the lens of his camera. The final pages of Diaspora list his subjects’ names, a catalog as diverse and improbable as the photos themselves. Brenner says he included the names not only to express gratitude but “to enable us to touch something else of this identity that takes so many colors and so many forms.”

When Brenner was a child in Paris, Judaism did not play a central role in his life. His parents, the children of Jewish immigrants from Algeria and Eastern Europe, were primarily concerned with blending into French society. They observed few Jewish traditions, and topics like the Holocaust were rarely discussed at home. That began to change in 1968, when Israel’s Six Day War caused the Brenners to reexamine their Jewish heritage. A few years later, they enrolled their son Frederic in a Jewish secondary school. “I was not at all interested,” says Brenner. “I was much more involved with Zen Buddhism at that time. But I believe those three years were important. I needed this physical relation with my own history.”

At the age of 19, Brenner visited Israel and was intrigued to find not one but many strands of Jewish tradition. Waves of Middle Eastern had immigrated to the Jewish State, bringing their own customs from Syria, Iraq and Tunisia. Ethiopian Jews were also just then beginning to cross into Israel via the Sudan. The young Brenner was seized by a desire to record these Diaspora communities before they scattered throughout the modern world or immigrated en masse to Israel. Although he had never been formally trained as a photographer, traveling the world with a camera seemed the ideal way to do it.

Brenner soon gained recognition—and private funding—for his photographs of Jews in the mountains of Africa, the jungles of Asia, the dim caverns of Yemen. He began traveling seven to eight months a year, shooting exquisitely composed black and white images in natural light. When a grant allowed him to trek the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, his camera defied Fiddler on the Roof stereotypes by capturing a baffling range of diversity: willowy dancers in Moscow, olive skinned barbers in Tajikstan, and factory workers in Birobidzhan, a frozen eastern region that has been an autonomous Jewish state since 1934. “From the very beginning, my journey was about people,” says Brenner. “Photography was just a great pretext to get to them.”

Some of the communities Brenner visited were so fragile in their isolation that Brenner wondered whether he ought to be photographing them at all. The Marranos of Belmonte, Portugal, were one such group. When Brenner first visited them in 1985, they were living as Crypto-Jews, practicing their religion in secret without Torah or rabbi, just as their ancestors had done since the time of the Inquisition. In their 500 years outside the Jewish mainstream, the Marranos had developed an entirely unique set of rituals. They observed Passover standing in a river, symbolically “parting the waters” with a tree branch, and they kneaded their matzoh dough in a darkened attic, singing a prayer unknown to the rest of the Jewish world. “Do not think,” says Brenner, “that I didn’t ask myself, ‘Do I have the right to take their image?’” The Marranos’ existence soon changed drastically, partly as a result of Brenner’s photographs and a short film he created about their way of life. Today, they practice Judaism overtly, reading from the Torah and reciting Hebrew prayers in a newly built synagogue.

After his work in Belmonte, Brenner’s project of documenting vanishing Diaspora communities seemed to be nearing its end. “For the first ten years, my object was my subject,” says Brenner. “These groups were disappearing, and I wanted to save them from oblivion. I thought I was just taking the camera and doing ‘click.’” Only later did Brenner recognize that his work had an intensely personal dimension. Every one of his images, he realized, was actually a self-portrait, shaped by his own ideas of how Judaism should look and feel. In documenting the most remote corners of the Jewish world, Brenner was exploring the depth and breadth of his own heritage. “From that time on,” he says, “I began consciously using photography as a way to reclaim those parts of my own history of which I was a product, of which I was ignorant, of which my parents never spoke.”

In the 1990s, Brenner began photographing Jewish communities that showed no sign of disappearing—those of Rome, Hong Kong, Latin America and the United States. His very style became more aesthetic and whimsical. In contrast to his naturalistic early photos—a wedding couple in Tunisia or a group of mustachioed men in a Soviet café—he began posing elaborate, often playful shots, some requiring the organization and budget of a full-scale stage production. In China, he invited hundreds of Jews from Bejing, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong to carry an ark through a gap in the Great Wall. In South Africa, he found Brenda, a woman who trained black maids in the art of Jewish cooking, and persuaded her class to pose beneath several dozen mounted impala heads.

Not surprisingly, Brenner found some of his most outlandish subjects in the United States. In 1994, he zigzagged the country to produce a dizzying collection of Jewish images. In one, women who survived the Holocaust stand wrapped in black fabric with their lesbian daughters. In another, a group of bearded, tattooed men gather outside their Miami Beach synagogue on Harley Davidson motorcycles. Many of Brenner’s American photos reflect more than a touch of irony—he photographed students from the Hebrew Academy in Las Vegas beside the Egyptian pyramids of the Luxor Hotel and labeled a portrait of sixteen Groucho impersonators with the caption “Marxists.” When he assembled a group of Jewish New York psychoanalysts, Brenner squeezed them behind an enormous couch and lined the office with busts of Sigmund Freud.

In 2000, Brenner traveled to Buenos Aires to tackle a more somber subject: Jewish women whose sons and daughters were among the thousands of political prisoners taken by the Argentine government two decades ago. To reflect the women’s inner void, and the sterile rooms where their children had been imprisoned and killed, Brenner dressed his subjects in white hospital gowns and placed them under harsh fluorescent lights. “In Argentina, the work was about grief,” Brenner recalls. “But why was I drawn like a magnet to Argentina instead of dealing with the loss and mourning in Europe, a place so deeply connected with my own family? It was only after Argentina that I was able to return to Europe and push that other door.”

Brenner’s portraits of European Jews, taken during the last three years, are simpler and more intimate than his images of Americans. One series features Parisians of North African origin—a smiling grandfather in a beret, a heavyset man in shorts, a deeply tanned woman with her child. Others place close-ups of European Jewish faces beside scenes from the subjects’ native cities. A German writer appears next to a wintry shot of Berlin train tracks. A bespectacled public relations manager is pictured alongside an exhibit about racial theory from Vienna’s Museum of Natural History.

Diaspora’s last photograph, taken in 2002, is one of Brenner’s most arresting: a group of non-Jewish villagers in Tykocin, Poland, enacting a Purimspiel. During the Holocaust, all of the town’s Jews were rounded up and killed—today, the children of their Polish neighbors tell the story of Mordechai and Queen Esther who saved the Jews from death. In Brenner’s photo, Poles dressed in crowns, beards and Jewish prayer shawls stand before the corpse of Haman, an effigy swinging eerily from a gallows. “This came very close to my own history,” says Brenner. “But at the same time, I was able to look on it in this way, as an outsider. It was with this closeness and this distance that I was able to question and to photograph.”

Today, Brenner’s Jewish identity is strong and intensely personal. He observes Shabbat but is reluctant to discuss his specific practices. “There are so many ways to observe Shabbat,” he points out. “To say I respect Shabbat means nothing. It’s not an insurance policy. It’s not a definition. It is only the beginning of a one-week conversation.” In a similar way, he resists what he calls “the temptation to build meaning” out of his photographs. To him, human life is a great mystery, and Judaism is a tool to explore its innermost depths.

But while Brenner’s work does not attempt to capture the Jewish soul, it does celebrate Judaism’s coat of many colors, the worldwide community Brenner calls klal Yisrael. “Each of us, from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic, is woven of all these many threads and filled with all these many voices,” he says. “My own humanity is at the price of acknowledging all those voices, even when they are dissonant.”