Frédéric Brenner (born 1959) is a French photographer known for his documentation of Jewish communities around the world. His work has been exhibited internationally, among others, at the

International Center of Photography The International Center of Photography (ICP) is a photography museum and school at 84 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. ICP's photographic collection, reading room, and archives are at Mana Contemporary in Jer ...

in New York, the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne,

Rencontres d'Arles The Rencontres d'Arles (formerly called ''Rencontres internationales de la photographie d'Arles'') is an annual summer photography festival founded in 1970 by the Arles photographer Lucien Clergue, the writer Michel Tournier and the historian ...

in Arles, the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

in New York, and the

Joods Historisch Museum The (; ), part of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, is a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to Jewish history, culture and religion, in the Netherlands and worldwide. It is the only museum in the Netherlands dedicated to Jewish history. History The Jood ...

in Amsterdam. In 1996, Brenner created an installation on Ellis Island, in New York, featuring several prominent Jewish Americans, including Lauren Bacall, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mark Spitz and Mayor Ed Koch among others. The installation, and events leading up to it, was filmed by the documentary director Kevin Weyl.

Early life and education

Brenner was born in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and grew up in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. In 1981, Brenner received a B.A. in French Literature and Social Anthropology from the

Paris-Sorbonne University Paris-Sorbonne University (also known as Paris IV; ) was a public university, public research university in Paris, France, active from 1971 to 2017. It was the main inheritor of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Paris. In 2018, it m ...

. He went on to study at the

École des hautes études en sciences sociales The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (, EHESS) is a graduate ''grande école'' and '' grand établissement'' in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The school awards Master and PhD degrees alone and conj ...

and received a M.A. in Social Anthropology, also awarded by the Sorbonne. Brenner is the recipient of the

Niépce Prize The Niépce Prize has been awarded annually since 1955 to a professional photographer who has lived and worked in France for over 3 years and is younger than 50 years (previously 45 years) of age. It was introduced in honour of Joseph Nicéphore N ...

and his book ''Diaspora: Homelands in Exile'' won the 2004

National Jewish Book Award The Jewish Book Council (Hebrew: ), founded in 1943, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of qual ...

in Visual Arts.

Career

At age 19, Brenner began photographing Orthodox Jews in the

Mea Shearim Mea Shearim (, lit., "hundred gates"; contextually, "a hundred fold", Ashkenazi Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation: Meye Shorim) is one of the oldest Ashkenazi neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside of the Old City. It is populated by Ashkenazi Hared ...

neighborhood of

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

. Initially, he believed this was "authentic Judaism," but his approach quickly evolved into an exploration of the multiplicities of dissonant identities. In 1981, Brenner began photographing Jewish communities around the world, exploring what it means to live and survive with a portable identity and how Jews adopted the traditions and manners of their home countries and yet remained part of the Jewish people. He spent 25 years chronicling the diaspora of the Jews across the world from Rome to New York, India to Yemen, Morocco to Ethiopia, Sarajevo to Samarkand. Brenner has published five books and directed three films. His work has been shown in museums and galleries around the world. He has been represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York since 1990. Brenner’s opus ''Diaspora: Homelands in Exile'' was published as a two-volume set of photographs and texts by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

in 2003 and appeared in four foreign editions. Diaspora was also a major exhibition, which opened in New York at the

in 2003 and traveled to nine other cities in America, Europe and Mexico. In reviewing the book, ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

'' wrote: "Brenner's work—elegiac, celebratory, irreverent—transcends portraiture, representing instead a prolonged, open-ended inquiry into the nature of identity and heritage."

NPR National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more ...

Robert Siegel Robert Charles Siegel (born June 26, 1947) is an American retired radio journalist. He was one of the co-hosts of the National Public Radio afternoon news broadcast ''All Things Considered'' from 1987 until his retirement in January 2018. Ear ...

has described Brenner's work as "a celebration of the diversity and complexity of diaspora." In 2006, Brenner founded This Place, a collective photography project aimed at recontextualizing Israel from multiple perspectives. The photographers working on this project include Wendy Ewald,

Martin Kollar Martin may refer to: Places Antarctica * Martin Peninsula, Marie Byrd Land * Port Martin, Adelie Land * Point Martin, South Orkney Islands Europe * Martin, Croatia, a village * Martin, Slovakia, a city * Martín del Río, Aragón, Spain * Mart� ...

Josef Koudelka Josef Koudelka (born 10 January 1938) is a Czech-French photographer. He is a member of Magnum Photos and has won awards such as the Prix Nadar (1978), a Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), a Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991) ...

, Jungjin Lee,

Gilles Peress Gilles Peress (born December 29, 1946) is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos. Peress began working with photography in 1970, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. One of Peress' first projects exa ...

Fazal Sheikh Fazal Sheikh (born June 27, 1965 in New York City) is an artist who uses photographs to document people living in displaced and marginalized communities around the world. Life and career Fazal Sheikh is an artist who uses photographs to documen ...

Stephen Shore Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include ''Uncommon Places'' (1982) and ''American Surfaces ...

, Rosalind Solomon,

Thomas Struth Thomas Struth (born 11 October 1954) is a German photographer who is best known for his ''Museum Photographs'' series, black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s, and his family photographs series. ...

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian photographer. He is artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he h ...

, and

Nick Waplington Nick Waplington (born 1965) is a British / American artist and photographer. Many books of Waplington's work have been published, both self-published and through Aperture, Cornerhouse, Mack, Phaidon, and Trolley. His work has been shown in sol ...

. This Place will be exhibited internationally, beginning at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague in the fall of 2014.

Bibliography

*''Jerusalem, Instants d'Eternité.'' Paris:

Éditions Denoël Éditions Denoël is a French publishing house founded in 1930. Acquired by Éditions Gallimard in 1951, it publishes collections spanning fiction, non-fiction and comic books. It published some of the most important French authors of the interwa ...

, 1984. *''Israel.'' New York:

; London: Collins Harville, 1988. With texts by A. B. Yehoshua *''Marranes.'' Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1992. With an essay by Y.H. Yerushalmi. *''Jews/America/A Representation.'' New York:

Abrams Books Abrams, formerly Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (HNA), is an American publisher of art and illustrated books, children's books, and stationery. The enterprise is a subsidiary of the French publisher Média-Participations. Run by president and CEO Mar ...

, 1996. With an essay by

Simon Schama Sir Simon Michael Schama ( ; born 13 February 1945) is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a professor of history and art history at Columbia Uni ...

. *''Exile at Home.'' New York:

, 1998. With a poem by

Yehuda Amichai Yehuda Amichai (; born Ludwig Pfeuffer 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israelis, Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew language, Hebrew in modern times. Yehuda Amichai, the poet of everyday life, love, ...

. *''Diaspora: Homelands in Exile.'' New York:

, 2003. *''An Archeology of Fear and Desire.'' London: Mack, 2014.

Filmography

*1991, ''Les derniers Marranes'' (The Last Marranos), with Stan Neumann, produced by Les Films d’Ici, distributed by Europe Images International. *2003, ''Tykocin'', with Jérôme de Missolz, ZKO Films. *2003, ''Madres de Desaparecidos'', ZKO Films.

Exhibitions

*1982 Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, France *1983 Consejo Mexicano de Photographias, Bellas Artes, Mexico City *1991

, Amsterdam *1992

, New York *1990

, Arles *1993 Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York *1993 Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne *1994

, Arles *1996 Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York *2003

, New York *2004

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

, New York *2022 Joods Museum, Amsterdam

References

External links

Frederic Brenner's website

This Place website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brenner, Frederic French photographers French people of Jewish descent 1959 births Living people