Are the people of Israel truly modern and progressive Israelis are about to undergo the ultimate test: Will thousands of them willingly gather at one of the country’s best-known sites, remove all their clothing and smile for the camera? Spencer Tunick, an internationally renowned Jewish photographer, has made a name for himself by rounding up…
From February 10 through May 23, “Unexposed: Munich Photographers in Exile,” a compelling exhibit at Munich’s Jewish Museum, focused on the art and fate of three photographers who fled Germany for Palestine in the 1930s, thereby remaining mostly unknown in their native land. Alfons Himmelreich (1904-1993), Efrem Ilani (1910-1999), and Jakob Rosner (1902-1950) all became…
Photographing movie stills, where the images are essentially held captive in a confined, measured space, might seem like predictable work. Not so for Inbal Abergil, whose absorbing new exhibit, “24 Frames Per Second,” opened at New York’s Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects in Chelsea on July 15. To capture the eleven 33-square-inch images that make up…
Fans of photography are discovering that a “slender, soft-spoken unobtrusive, curly-haired Midwestern Jewish girl,” as journalist Melissa Fay Greene calls Esther Bubley, was one of America’s most sensitive camera artists from the 1940s onward. Greene’s “The Photographs of Esther Bubley” from D. Giles Limited tells how Bubley was born in Wisconsin in 1921 to a…
As the ringleader of the ragtag group of professional hedonists, acid-eating Buddhists, and scribbling loners known as the Beats, Allen Ginsberg played many roles. Though Ginsberg is best known as a progenitor of 1950s and ’60s counterculture, when he whipped bookstore readings into frenzies with “Howl” and negotiated with the Hell’s Angels to ensure the…
The great French Jewish photographer Willy Ronis died last year at age 99, and until August 22, his centenary exhibit “Willy Ronis: the Poetics of Engagement” (“Willy Ronis, une poétique de l’engagement”) can be seen, oddly enough, at the Paris Mint, la Monnaie de Paris. Whereas Ronis was a left-wing defender of the downtrodden working…
Some Jewish photographers embrace subject matter which plays better overseas than in the United States. One example is Weegee, born Usher Fellig in Złoczów, whose photos of low class nightlife and crime were infused with a raucous gusto that charmed Europe decades before he received adequate recognition in America. Leon Levinstein, an even more difficult…
How did a nice Jewish podiatrist from Bayonne, New Jersey become an internationally famous glamor photographer of flowers? That question may be mulled over by visitors to the exhibit of photos by Jonathan Singer, which opened May 14 and runs until June 4 at the Legends Gallery in Chatham, New Jersey. Last year Abbeville Press…
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