‘What do you see?” asked the French-born photographer Frédéric Brenner while showing me his new book, “An Archeology of Fear and Desire,” during a recent interview in the Manhattan offices of one of his longtime funders, the Revson Foundation. His photography books, among them 1996’s “Jews/America: A Representation” and 2003’s “Diaspora: Homelands in Exile,” with…
Garry Winogrand, New York, 1968, gelatin silver print, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Walking through the many rooms in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibit “Garry Winogrand” (through June 8), I was surprised to see several groups of transfixed boys. Winogrand, after all, was born in 1928 and died…
The grandfather of the man suspected in the mass killing in Santa Barbara, California, was a famed British photojournalist who took iconic photos of Jewish survivors and mass graves at liberated concentration camps in the final weeks of World War II. Police identified Elliot Rodger, 22, a college student as the gunman who drove through…
The anonymous narrator of Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall” wonders why his neighbor insists upon having an artificial barrier between their properties. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines,” he says. But all his neighbor does is echo,…
Photo Credit: Margaret Olin Much was made in 2010 of Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, “becoming part of the story” when he treated the Haitian patients he’d been sent to report on. The journalistic ethics, it appeared, were murky; should reporters — particularly those with medical training — abandon their professional posts to help…
Diane Arbus’s “Jewish Giant,” the second installment in the Jewish Museum’s innovative Masterpieces & Curiosities series, is an entire show dedicated to interrogating the competing meanings contained within a single photograph by Diane Arbus. The photo itself, “A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y, 1970,” is mounted in a vitrine…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here Menachem Kipnis is known to Jewish history as a cultural figure who worked across several fields. Born in Uzhmir, Ukraine in 1878, Kipnis distinguished himself as a singer, ethnomusicologist and journalist. As a singer he was the first Jewish tenor in the Warsaw Opera (1902-1918) and…
Copyright William Klein/Courtesy HackelBury Fine Art, London At almost 86, the pioneering photographer, artist and filmmaker William Klein, continues to draw a crowd. On February 23, Klein was at Jewish Book Week in London discussing his life and work with Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC and editor and presenter of the television arts…
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