Building the Frédéric Brenner Archive

 In 1978, at the age of 19, Frédéric Brenner embarked on his first photography project, an exploration of Mea Shearim, an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. The project, which portrays how these Jews from Eastern Europe recreated diaspora in Israel, became Brenner’s first book, Jérusalem: Instants d'Éternité, published in Paris in 1984. In 1981, Brenner undertook a chronicle of Jewish communities around the world, from Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Morocco to Ethiopia, Sarajevo to Samarkand, he spent 25 years in over 40 countries recording the diaspora of the Jews and creating a probing pursuit of the multiplicity of dissonant identities. Along the way, he published five books and directed three films (Marranos, Madres de Desaparecidos, Tykocin). Brenner’s opus, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, was published as a two-volume set of photographs and texts by Harper Collins in 2003. It won a National Jewish Book Award for Visual Arts in 2004 and appeared in four foreign editions. Diaspora was also a major exhibition, which opened in New York at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2003 and traveled to nine other cities in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. In 2007, Brenner initiated, organized and was the artistic director of a major new project, This Place, which explores Israel and the West Bank as place and metaphor through the eyes of twelve major photographers who ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner life of individuals – beyond the political narrative and free of a dual perspective of “for” and “against.”