Jews and Photography

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

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 questions, “What is Jewish Art?" and "Is there such a thing as Jewish Art?” have been debated by art historians and Jewish studies scholars for centuries. In recent decades, a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars, critics, and curators have noted the preponderance of Jewish photographers who have shaped the medium. What is the role – and what are the limits – of Jewish biography and Jewish identity in understanding the work of Jewish photographers?

In each of these six sessions, we will explore the unique contribution of Jews to shaping the history and medium of photography, including the practice of image-making, the establishment of photo agencies and the transmission, editing, and dissemination of images, and photography as visual activism. In richly illustrated presentations and lively class discussions, topics under consideration will include, but are not exhausted by: photography as anti-fascism, with a focus on Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim's photographs fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War; Holocaust Trauma and Memory, with a focus on examining the perpetrator, bystander, and victim photographers of Nazi ghettos in shaping visual records, Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of the liberation of concentration camps, and Roman Vishniac's images of Jewish life in 1930s Central and Eastern Europe; Jewish women photographers in Weimar Germany and interwar Europe; iconic images of the American Civil Rights Movement made by Jewish photographers and Jewish visual activism, with a focus on the work of Jill Freedman, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Danny Lyon, and Gillian Laub; vernacular photography and the imagined future of a Vernacular Jewish Photography Archive.

Readings will include previous attempts – often deeply problematic missteps – to pose and answer the question, “Why are so many of the great photographers Jewish?,” and we will explore alternate approaches and theories to the question. Is there such a thing as a Jewish photograph, or, as some have claimed, a "Jewish sensibility" in photography? Jewish photographers' engagements with the photographic image will be explored in relationship to exile, diaspora and immigration, political art intended to affect social change, artistic communities and notions of kinship, antisemitism directed towards Jewish photographers, gender and sexuality, photojournalism, modernism, and visual cultural theory, Zionism and anti-Zionism, Jewish family albums, the role (and absence) of non-Ashkenazi photo histories, and the imagination of possible futures.

Course Materials:
The instructor will provide all course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

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 material culture. She has held positions in museums for twenty-five years, including the Getty Museum, RISD Museum, Jewish Museum of Florence, Italy, and Harvard University Art Museums, 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 recently organized an exhibition of photographer and filmmaker Gillian Laub’s contemporary images of racial segregation in the American South, Southern Rites, that is traveling through 2025; her most recent exhibition, Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging, opened at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in November, 2022.

Maya’s next book, on the Jewishness of Photography, will be published by Aperture. She is currently 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 the world’s first Jewish Vernacular Photography Archive.

Maya is a graduate of Brown University, Harvard University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Yale University.

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