The faces of the tribe
A photographic exhibition seeks to subvert your preconceptions about what it means to be Jewish
V FEW JEWS pretend that their tribe is anything other than diverse — but it is one thing to imagine that diversity and quite another to see it staring you in the face.
London-based photographer John Offenbach’s provocatively-titled exhibition, JEW, at the Jewish Museum until April 19, deliberately challenges that mental picture.
Among the 34 large-scale portraits on display are a young black chef, a homeless man, a prisoner, a comedian (recognisable as Matt Lucas) and the enigmatically titled ‘Tattooed Girl’ and ‘Transsexual’.
Mr Offenbach travelled around the UK, Israel and the US, and to towns, villages and outposts in India, Morocco, Austria, Ethiopia, Barbados, Argentina, China, Ukraine and Azerbaijan to find diaspora members to photograph — although he insisted that “my thinking was not necessarily to see it entirely as a diaspora project”.
The white backgrounds, the lack of names — each portrait is titled not by the sitter’s name, but by their occupation or circumstances — and the use of black-and-white tints have the effect of bringing each subject into the same narrative framework while highlighting their visual differences.
Mr Offenbach said: “I travelled with a neutral background and photographed each portrait against it, in black and white. The result is more objective, and at the same time more inclusive, in that each one, devoid of its surroundings becomes part of a single story”.
In one of his more memorable shoots, he visited Bruce Rich, a US man convicted of murdering his parents. He said: “I was nervous before meeting him in a Miami prison, expecting to meet a monster. Instead, and perhaps even more disturbing, I met a man who seemed familiar and convivial. He could have been a long-lost friend.”
Despite experiencing some initial resistance regarding the project’s title, Mr Offenbach was adamant that the body of work should be called JEW. He said: “A large part of the project was to re-own that word — it shouldn’t be seen as an insult”. In fact, the name echoes the title of a Nazi exhibition, The Eternal Jew, which opened in Munich in November 1938 to promote stereotypes of Jews through photographs. By providing radically different images of the Jewish people, Mr Offenbach’s show is a very deliberate and precise challenge to that racist project.
The photographic series was inspired, in part, by August Sander, an early
20th century photographer who documented German people in a way that dismissed the era’s social divisions. Like Mr Sander’s work, Mr Offenbach said, “My project is about the faces. There is truth, honesty and diversity in these unretouched
A large part of the project was to re-own the word ‘Jew’
photographs. Each sitter is a normal person with a normal face, and I wanted to celebrate this normalcy. The ordinary is extraordinary and deserves our attention”. Dominik Czechowski, Head of Exhibitions at Jewish Museum London, said: “Offenbach’s bold and exciting work is very much part of our mission to celebrate Jewish culture and challenge prejudice and stereotypes.
“He, like us, seeks to represent the entire Jewish community in all its joyful complexity to the wider world”.