Unit: Photography

“Bride” and “Groom,” self-portraits by Rafael Goldchain.

Colloquium on Looking Jewish: Photography, Memory and the Sacred

SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2007
Bronfman Center
7 East 10th Street
New York University

Presented by the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion, Center for Religion and Media, New York University.

Since shortly after its invention in the late 1830s, photography has become a fixture of Jewish life around the world. While photographs of Jews have received considerable attention for the visual information they provide about their subjects, and Jewish photographers’ work has been scrutinized for its artistry, relatively little attention has been paid to photography as a Jewish social practice. With this colloquium, our working group initiates a larger discussion of this topic, focusing on portraiture and its role in memorializing the “vanished world” of East European Jewry before the Holocaust.

The social practices of photography embrace a wide array of activities: the social contract, if often implicit, entailed in the act of taking (and forbidding) photographs; the materiality of photographs, expressed in how they are displayed as well as how they are incorporated into works of visual art from multi-media installations to documentary films, in addition to their being printed on all manner of things, including mugs, t-shirts, cakes, and even prayer shawls; the relationship of photographs and language, including captions, keywords, narratives, and criticism; the processes of collecting, inventorying, and displaying photographs, both by professional archives and museums and by private individuals and families; various memory practices involving photography, assigning them an “afterlife” of some kind through remediation and conversation. We view all these practices as fertile ground for exploring technology’s place in spiritual engagement.

We plan to continue the discussion of this rich field of inquiry during the 2007-2008 academic year. Today we are especially grateful to our presenters and discussants for inaugurating this inquiry with their probing work and insightful reflections.

Co-conveners:

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University
Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University

Note: This colloquium coincides with the exhibition And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews, a program of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, North American Council, and The Florence & Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University, at the Yeshiva University Museum, 15 West 16th Street.

Program

9:00-9:30 AM: Coffee and welcome Faye Ginsburg and Angela Zito, Co-directors, Center for Religion and Media

9:30-10:00 AM
Introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, Co-conveners, Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion: “Beyond the Image: Photography as a Jewish Social Practice”

10:00 AM-12:00 PM
Presentation by Maya Benton: “Shuttered Memories of a Vanishing World: The Deliberate Photography of Roman Vishniac”
Chair: Olga Gershenson
Panelists: Max Kozloff, Sadia Shepard, David Shneer, Wendy Steiner, Leah Strigler, Aviva Weintraub, Carol Zemel

12:00-1:00 PM: Lunch break

1:00-3:00 PM
Presentation by Maya Balakirsky-Katz: “The Life and Afterlife of Rebbe Portraits in Habad Visual Culture, 1798–2006”
Chair: Henry Goldschmidt
Panelists: Sam Heilman, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Vivian Mann, Patricia Spyer, Angela Zito

3:00-3:30 PM: Coffee break

3:30-5:30 PM
Presentation by Rafael Goldchain: “Familial Ground,” an autobiographical photographic installation
Chair: Andrew Ingall
Panelists: Jonathan Boyarin, Susan Chevlowe, Faye Ginsburg, Marianne Hirsch, Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt

Participants include:

Maya Balakirsky-Katz
Maya Benton
Jonathan Boyarin
Susan Chevlowe
Olga Gershenson
Faye Ginsburg
Rafael Goldchain
Henry Goldschmidt
Samuel Heilman
Marianne Hirsch
Shelley Hornstein
Andrew Ingall
Jenna Weissman Joselit
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Max Kozloff
Laura Levitt
Vivian B. Mann
Jeffrey Shandler
Sadia Shepard
David Shneer
Patricia Spyer
Wendy Steiner
Leah Strigler
Aviva Weintraub
Carol Zemel
Angela Zito

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Unit: Photography

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