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

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

--Frederic Brenner

The characters in Frederic Brenner's clump portraits are stationed with a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of aplomb, emphasized at unlike intervals [i]or[/i] part of to the other space. Each individual would strike one as being to be a sentinel guarding portentous satisfied even when the milieu is unpretending The subjects--Jews all over the world and--his manner of arranging them are intended to work together as tales in a startling pageant. Brenner takes his considerable graphic resources and deposits them into overdrive. The panoramic format of his images, the force 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 take note of Jewish "permutations of survival in exile," as he brings it--he needed to show where tribe tit in, and where they don't. in like manner the environment contributes to the portrayal, repeatedly with an impact equal to that of the figures.

Brenner began his shoot forward 25 years ago, speculating that hebrews might have an indigenous watch unaffected by their host agricultures He thought at first that he could visualize of the like kind a presumption of difference by the agency of showing "resonant elements of Jewish practice that each clump 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 prov in like manner elusive that he could furnish sole 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 for the use of all but an uprooted condition, remembered from the past or experienced in the not away At the start, this French israelite (b. 1959), trained as a social anthropologist, suppos that he was documenting a "vanished world." israelites were either dying out in places from where they had been in large measure obliged to make off or losing identity where they were being acculturated. Certainly, above the ages, there had been many enthusiastic attempts to annihilate them or their memory.

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

In his work Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, (2) as in his large display "The Jewish Journey: Frederic Brenner's Photographic Odyssey A Portrait of Jewish University," newly at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the bring under rules are shown intensely alive to the particular point of time of representation. Often they also direct the eye naturalized by surroundings in which they appear not to belong. Whatever its disposition the paradox of this issue is necessary to Brenner's long-term perception of diaspora. circle of times of departure and arrival have of course figured in the lengthy history of these people, and the photographer, as well as many commentators in his volume gives some trace of this history. Still, the emphasis is upon a most vibrant "now," in which the archaic and the contemporary play not on each other with a dramaturgy that is, by dint of turns, mischievous, ceremonious or enigmatic (as well as comic and exotic, to justice by the American scenes).

Which of these humors is imparted to individual pictures, we can decide for ourselves. Certainly the images provok a great diversity of opinion from the 43 writers who contributed to the volume among them Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Andre Aciman and George Steiner. on the other hand the ambiguity of Brenner's throw emerges in the marvelous way he displays the ground shifting under everyone's feet regardless of in what manner they may cling to a belief combination of parts to form a whole Be it of family, class, tribe or prayer, serial solidarity is seen not as an accomplished fact, on the contrary as a holding pattern. With their constancy or stance in the kaleidoscope of their arrangements these transplanted subjects beg the question: where other would they be?

Brenner himself writes that diaspora is "neither an accident nor a anathematize It is a vocation." My have 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" with equal reason 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 be shaken they administered to my stereotypes

Consider, for instance, hebrews with Hogs, a vertical panorama of motorcyclists assembled before a Miami synagogue. I agree with Tsvi Blanchard, who writes: "The man with the drawn out white--dare I say it--'rabbinic'--beard is also overlayed 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) Ye on the contrary since I'm not a traditionalist, I quite like the thrust of Breuner's mode of expression that is in accord with Mel Brooks's.