Diaspora and its quandaries: Frederic Brenner's 25-year odyssey took him from Jerusalem to Manaus, Tajikistan, Johannesburg and Las Vegas, to make photographic portraits of Jews, mostly in groups

Art in America, May, 2004 by Max Kozloff

My entire project is about breaking an emblematic representation of the Jew ... There are as many ways to be a Jew as there are ways to be a man or woman among the peoples of the earth.

--Frederic Brenner

The characters in Frederic Brenner's group portraits are stationed with much aplomb, emphasized at unlike intervals through space. Each individual would seem to be a sentinel guarding portentous content, even when the milieu is humble. The subjects--Jews all over the world and--his manner of arranging them are intended to work together as complements in a startling pageant. Brenner takes his considerable graphic resources and puts them into overdrive. The panoramic format of his images, the strength of his blacks and whites, the pronounced grandeur of his staging, and the intensity of the faces, single or in chorus, grab your attention right away. In order to visualize his program--to observe Jewish "permutations of survival in exile," as he puts it--he needed to show where people tit in, and where they don't. So, the environment contributes to the portrayal, often with an impact equal to that of the figures.

Brenner began his project 25 years ago, speculating that Jews might have an indigenous outlook, unaffected by their host cultures. He thought at first that he could visualize such a presumption of difference by showing "resonant elements of Jewish practice that each group had retained. Only when these ... elements were considered together," he writes, "could we ... glimpse klal Israel--the community of Israel." (1) Too bad that along the way, this theme proved so elusive that he could furnish only faint or outlandish variations of it.

Wherever he traveled, in fact, his findings rarely matched each other. For the scattered communities he describes had little visibly in common but an uprooted condition, remembered from the past or experienced in the present. At the start, this French Jew (b. 1959), trained as a social anthropologist, supposed that he was documenting a "vanished world." Jews were either dying out in places from where they had been in large measure obliged to flee, or losing identity where they were being acculturated. Certainly, over the ages, there had been many enthusiastic attempts to annihilate them or their memory.

One might therefore have expected Brenner to approach such "last ors" with a feeling of lament or elegy. After all, this had been the atmosphere generated by Edward Sheriff Curtis in The North American Indian, and by Roman Vishniac, more grimly, in his photographic report on the doomed shtetls of Poland in the 1930s. But Brenner notices oppression or suffering as among several other, equally compelling, states. And by the cud, he leaves us convinced that his people are net going away.

In his book Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, (2) as in his large show, "The Jewish Journey: Frederic Brenner's Photographic Odyssey, A Portrait of Jewish University," recently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the subjects are shown intensely alive to the particular moment of representation. Often they also look naturalized by surroundings in which they appear not to belong. Whatever its mood, the paradox of this effect is necessary to Brenner's long-term perception of diaspora. Cycles of departure and arrival have of course figured in the long history of these people, and the photographer, as well as many commentators in his book, gives some trace of this history. Still, the emphasis is on a most vibrant "now," in which the archaic and the contemporary play off each other with a dramaturgy that is, by turns, mischievous, ceremonious or enigmatic (as well as comic and exotic, to judge by the American scenes).

Which of these moods is imparted to individual pictures, we can decide for ourselves. Certainly the images provoked a great diversity of opinion from the 43 writers who contributed to the book, among them Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Andre Aciman and George Steiner. But the ambiguity of Brenner's project emerges in the marvelous way he shows the ground shifting under everyone's feet, regardless of how they may cling to a belief system. Be it of family, class, tribe or prayer, serial solidarity is seen not as an accomplished fact, but as a holding pattern. With their constancy or stance in the kaleidoscope of their settlements, these transplanted subjects beg the question: where else would they be?

Brenner himself writes that diaspora is "neither an accident nor a curse. It is a vocation." My own place in it, I think, is like that of Jonathan Miller, who said: "I'm not really a Jew; just Jew-ish, not the whole hog." So I regard Brenner's pictures with an appetite for their shades of meaning, rather than viewing them as a conclusive account. Just the same, when I engaged with his images, I was unprepared for the jolt they administered to my stereotypes.

Consider, for instance, Jews with Hogs, a vertical panorama of motorcyclists assembled before a Miami synagogue. I agree with Tsvi Blanchard, who writes: "The man with the long white--dare I say it--'rabbinic'--beard is also covered with tat toos--anathema in traditional Jewish society. The part of him that says 'age and sage' doesn't fit with the part that says 'Harley and helmet.'" (3) Yes, but since I'm not a traditionalist, I quite like the thrust of Breuner's style that is in accord with Mel Brooks's.