Homelands in exile

When Frederic Brenner went to work almost 30 years ago it was one photograph he took, then another and before long there were the thousands of images that make up this remarkable body of work.
Diaspora: homelands in exile, gathers a selection of lyrical black and white images of the Jewish Diaspora as it does in an accompanying book of the same name. The photographic exhibit is now on at the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne.
On his lengthy search of authentic Jewishness Brenner went to more than 40 countries aiming his lens at the keepers
of remnant cultures who often kept their traditions out of sight of prying eyes.
For three months this series of photographs of Israel, Italy, the United States, Russia, Spain, South Africa and Poland will be celebrated by Victorians as it was by guests of the United Nations gallery and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City in previous years.
Brenner was born in 1959 in Paris. At 19 he had gone off to Israel with his camera. In the streets of Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish district of Mea Shearim he caught a thoughful first series of photos that he imagined were archetypal Jews preserving an ‘authentic’ Jewish culture.
Besides these earlier images is written the question that drove the photographer for 25 years of research, What is authentic Jewishness?
Brenner went moving slowly along from ethnographic documentation of his subjects to elegant, posed individual and family portraits. He brushed on the epic cycles of Jew history, of departures and return, but found an answer to satisfy his calling in the presence of cultural mingling.
In Rome of 1992 the inexorable influence of Italian life can be traced on the faces of Jewish men as they pose with motorbike helmets under their arms at the most iconic of Roman landmarks, the Colosseum. At the Arch of Titus, the old Roman port of the Jewish ghetto, women stand in a small group beckoning us to ask if they are the one family, the one race?
The melding of Jewish culture with the cultures of other lands is a theme that skips from frame to frame as one wonders this exhibition.
Idiosyncratic and sometimes outlandish images of the United States are Brenner’s most interesting as they directly challenge the stereotype of Jewishness.
What about the protesters of an anti-Semitic act in Montana of 1994. Each person; black, white and native American is alone, defiantly alone, tens of them as they march toward the camera each raising a Hanukkah.
How wonderful is the express conversion on a beach in Miami, Florida of 1994. We read that the people arrive in the morning for breakfast, they have three hours of lessons on Judaism and Kabbalah. They are then brought to the sea for a ritual immersion and given their Hebrew names. Lunch is offered, and they are Jews.
Of the years on the Iberian peninsula of inquisition and conquest we get a Diaspora within a Diaspora. After 1492 the Jews of Spain were forced to flee their homeland for the safety of neighbouring countries. In Morocco we first see a North African, or is it a Spaniard? Again we meet a Jewish character who is unique in the world.
A beautiful photo of the Marrano's of Portugal is a rare glimpse of people who vanished for centuries only to be rediscovered in 1917, and by the lens of Brenner.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is Jewishness as Brenner observed it. The shifting soul of the photographer who traipsed to five continents to achieve this fascinating collection eventually went back to Israel where he encountered some of the subjects he had snapped years earlier in other places. Again the obsessive chronicler took his camera out to capture these new exiles, at home.
Diaspora: homelands in exile is at the Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda until October 28.