Photography and Jewishness

Tuition: $360 | YIVO members: $270**
 

Register

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Maya Benton

The question, “What is Jewish Art?" has been debated by art historians and Jewish studies scholars for centuries. In recent decades, scholars and curators have noted the preponderance of Jewish photographers who have shaped the medium. Over that same period, arts institutions have increasingly foregrounded the ethnicity and cultural specificity of artists as a lens through which to understand their work, yet Jewish historiography – including forced exile and migration and the role that it plays in shaping the lives and work of photographers - has been avoided or omitted from exhibitions, biographies, and discussions of artists’ work. How does the role of Jewish biography and Jewish identity shape our understanding of the work of Jewish photographers?

In each of these six sessions, we will explore the unique contribution of Jews who shaped the history and medium of photography, including the practice of image-making, the role of exile and migration in the transmission of modernism, the establishment of photo agencies, and the dissemination of images as visual activism. We will also explore the role of Jewish family photographs in storytelling.

Through illustrated presentations and lively class discussions, topics will include: Jewish photographers who fought fascism with their cameras during the Spanish Civil War including Gerda Taro, Chim, and Robert Capa; Holocaust images, including Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of the liberation of concentration camps; Roman Vishniac's images of Jewish life in 1930s Central and Eastern Europe; Jewish women photographers in Weimar Germany and interwar Europe; the role that Jewish immigrants played in shaping Latin American modernism; Jewish photographers who turned their lenses on their own families and as self-portraiture; iconic images of the American Civil Rights Movement made by Jewish photographers including Freedman, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Danny Lyon, and Gillian Laub; vernacular photography, family albums, and the imagined future of a Vernacular Jewish Photography Archive; and an introduction of several of the most significant photographers and video artists working in Israel today. The role (and absence) of non-Ashkenazi photo histories – for example, the largely unexplored but widely circulated postcard images of North African Jewish women from the 1890s-1920s – will also be discussed.

Readings and will include historical and recent attempts to answer the question, “Why are so many of the great photographers Jewish?” and “Is there such a thing as a Jewish photograph?” or, as some have claimed, a "Jewish sensibility" in photography?  Renowned photographers and scholars will join several class discussions to share their work throughout the sessions. In addition to readings, links to online exhibitions, archives, and artists’ websites, as well as a wide range of award-winning documentary films, will be assigned as optional supplements to the reading.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas. Viewing links to documentary films will be provided whenever possible. However, private subscription services (such as Amazon Prime and Hulu) may be necessary to view optional, supplementary film suggestions.

Maya Benton is a museum curator and art historian based in New York City. From 2008 to 2019, Maya was a Curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, where she established a major archive and organized the most widely traveling exhibitions in ICP’s history. She has organized numerous international traveling exhibitions and is a frequent contributor to magazines and catalogues where she writes about photography, museums, and Jewish visual and material culture. She has held positions in museums for thirty years, including the Getty Museum, RISD Museum, Jewish Museum of Florence, Italy, Harvard University Art Museums, and ICP, and has served as curator-in-residence at several international galleries and cultural institutions. Her award-winning catalogues, exhibitions, and research have been translated into more than a dozen languages, garnering international acclaim including features in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Le Monde, Het Parool, El Pais, ArtNews, The Houston Chronicle, TIME, The Guardian and many other news outlets.

Maya is currently working on her next book, The Jewishness of Photography, and is establishing the Jews and Photography Initiative (JPI), a collaborative of more than two hundred international curators, archivists, interdisciplinary academics and critics who are interrogating the unique contribution of Jews to the history of the medium of photography, with projects including the creation of a Jewish Vernacular Photography Archive. For the past several years, she has taught a course at Yale University on Jews and Photography.

Maya is a graduate of Brown University, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and Harvard University.

**Become a member today, starting at $54 for one year, and pay the member price for classes! You’ll save on tuition for this course and more on future classes and public programs tickets.