October 8, 2003

A Photographer's Odyssey Captures a Myriad of Identities

n 1978 19-year-old Frédéric Brenner, a budding social anthropologist from France, set out to photograph the quintessential Jew.

He headed for Jerusalem, walked the alleyways of Mea Shearim, and captured men in long black coats hurrying home for Sabbath and bearded rabbis lecturing scholars in side curls.

"I believed this was authentic Judaism," Mr. Brenner said recently in an interview.

But after 25 years photographing Jews in more than 40 countries, Mr. Brenner concluded there is no such thing as an authentic Jew.

Is it the barber in Tajikistan, the drag queen in South Africa, the psychoanalyst on Park Avenue or Dustin Hoffman? Can the stern Soviet general who ran the Anti-Zionist Committee in Moscow be considered a Jew, or was he simply a Russian Communist?

Over a recent lunch of lox and bialys at Barney Greengrass in Manhattan, Mr. Brenner asked 10 existential questions for every one that he answered. His photographic exploration of the varieties of Jewish identity is on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and is collected in a two-volume set called "Diaspora: Homelands in Exile" (HarperCollins, 2003).

Early on he outgrew his assumption that the authentic Jew was a black-hatted Hasid living in a re-created shtetl in Jerusalem. With the help of local guides and informants, he sought out Jews who were neither Israeli nor American, neither Ashkenazi nor white nor male. He learned to distinguish Jews in Tunisia by the black stripe on the men's trousers (in memory of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem). He became as fascinated by assimilation as by cultural preservation.

"He began by photographing subjects that were iconically Jewish," said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor at New York University who was one of Mr. Brenner's American consultants. "But as he developed, he really tried to deconstruct the conventions for photographing Jews."

The turning point, Mr. Brenner said, came in 1992, when he lived in Rome. He shifted from ethnographic documentary to photographs as elaborately composed as movie stills. In Rome he posed an olive-skinned Jew in a room lined with emperors' busts, the subject's aquiline profile echoing the Roman heads. He assembled the vendors selling Roman Catholic icons and papal souvenirs in an empty St. Peter's Square — all of them Jews who he said inherited the vending permits as if they were heirloom kiddush cups.

"The entire project is about identity as a fiction," Mr. Brenner said. "All identity is made up."

He points to his portrait of Moises Elias, an Iraqi Jew living as a merchant in Calcutta, bare feet on an ottoman in his British colonial manse, his servant standing by with a tray of tea.

"It's like a game of Russian dolls," he said, adding that religious identity is nested in layers of culture, race and nationality.

Mr. Brenner has a matrushka-doll story of his own, although he says that initially his work was a way for him to avoid rather than to confront his history. Recounting his history, he said he grew up in France, and his mother's family was from Algeria, where family members adopted the culture and citizenship of their French occupiers long before they moved to France. His father's family came from Ukraine. During World War II his mother's parents were active in the Resistance, while most of his father's relatives died in the Holocaust.

His parents were French intellectuals who tried everything from the mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff to Buddhism, he said. His mother was a musician and music teacher who later moved to Israel; his father was a salesman who became a psychologist and now runs a business importing statuettes of the Virgin Mary made in China, to sell at Lourdes in France. (In the only family portrait in the book, Mr. Brenner posed his father with a halo of statuettes.)

Mr. Brenner says that his parents sent him to a Hebrew school in France only after they were stirred by the 1967 war in Israel. As a teenager he was more interested in karate and Zen Buddhism than in Judaism. Now, Mr. Brenner said, he keeps kosher and observes Shabbat, but does not attend synagogue services. He is 44, is married with two daughters, and divides his time among Paris, New York and Jerusalem.

He apparently inherited a knack for salesmanship. He persuaded six breast-cancer survivors who had mastectomies to be photographed topless, and a family of Portuguese Marranos, who practice Judaism in secret, to be photographed celebrating Passover in an attic.

Burt Sun, a production designer for film and television who assisted Mr. Brenner in the United States, recalled one grueling shoot in which Mr. Brenner photographed lesbians with their mothers, all Holocaust survivors. The photograph is taken from above, the mother and daughter pairs dressed in black sheaths, standing back to back, their arms linked and heads thrown back so the light washes over only their faces and torsos.

They stood for two hours while Mr. Brenner took pictures, Mr. Sun said. The pose was painful and one elderly survivor with a pacemaker was close to a faint. Mr. Sun said he shouted at Mr. Brenner to stop.

"He keeps pushing it," Mr. Sun said. "He wants more and more. He wants their emotion to reach the boiling point." The last shot was the one chosen for the print, he said, adding that the mothers and daughters left the room embracing as if they had survived something together.

Mr. Brenner has also sold his ideas to patrons, among them Charles Bronfman, Ronald Lauder and Steven Spielberg. Mr. Brenner spent several years in the United States photographing notable Americans, among them Mr. Spielberg, the Bronfman family, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barbra Streisand. He assembled the framed photographs for a wide-angle shot on Ellis Island in 1996.

Mr. Sun said that Mr. Brenner had hoped to include Woody Allen and Bob Dylan, but could not persuade Mr. Allen and could not reach Mr. Dylan.

Despite his family history, Mr. Brenner avoided focusing on the Holocaust. The few Holocaust photographs are memorable, like the one of the lesbians and their mothers or four Greek concentration camp survivors displaying the indelible numbers on their forearms. The only color photograph is of a woman and a room draped and papered entirely in a fabric of yellow stars — an image commissioned by the Vienna State Opera for the opera house curtain, which was never used.

"I wanted to show how Jews live," Mr. Brenner said, "not how they died."