Frédéric Brenner about ‘This Place’.
‘This Place’ explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers. Their highly individualized works combine to create not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait, alive to all the rifts and paradoxes of this important and much contested space.
The project follows in the tradition of such projects as the Mission Héliographique in nineteenth-century France and the Farm Security Administration in the United States, which gathered artists who use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. Initiated by photographer Frederic Brenner, the completed project consists of a traveling exhibition, companion publications and a program of live events.
Between 2007 and 2012, Frédéric Brenner led the overall project and made his own photographs, working with an 8 x 10 inch large-format camera, and for the first time in colour. His first photograph, the ‘Palace Hotel’, in 2009, became the prompt for his pungent and compassionate representation of life in contemporary Israel and of the promise attached to this land. He explored longing, belonging and exclusion in a land of devouring myths, in which social and religious constructs perpetuate a tyranny of roles that render us strangers to what is most intimate in ourselves. The exhibition features a selection of images from the approximately thirty that constitute his body of work published in the monograph ‘An Archeology of Fear and Desire’.
1.How do you describe the relationship between ‘This Place’ and your early works about Israel and Jewish people?
FB: I spent 25 years working in more than 40 countries, tracing the kind of portable identity that had developed as a result of the Jewish diaspora — the ways in which they adopted the customs and costumes of other cultures, but also maintained their own traditions. In my earlier pictures of Israel, I was more interested in the way the diaspora played out in Israel — the relationship between exile and home — and ways in which communities from around the world unpacked this portable identity in Israel. With ‘This Place’, I was more interested in how Jewish sovereignty demanded a reconfiguration of roles and responsibilities for all actors in the region. It is an attempt to recontextualize Israel as place and metaphor, exploring longing, belonging and exclusion. These images question the promise attached to this land and explore the cauldron of fear and shadow within this territory and in each of us, unrecognized, unredeemed, denied, dissimulated and silenced where the other is instrumentalized and thereby sacrificed.
2. What do you want to say with the photographs? What were your strongest feelings during and after this project?
FB: If you think too much about what you want the picture to say, you end up producing an image that is didactic and uninteresting. I prefer to open myself up to what particular scenes or people say to me. These are the real gifts of life for those who dare to adventure beyond the narrow pattern of the known and I believe that as much as we act, we are being acted upon and as much as we choose, we are being chosen. I cannot fail to think of one of my most favorite passages from Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “The feeble man claims to have achieved all that he wanted, and it’s a lie. The truth is that he prophetically dreamed all that life achieved through him. We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone and we sail forward in the air saying ‘Look at me move!’”
3. What kind of role do you want the photographs to play? Did you have any expectation as to the reaction of the viewers?
FB: I hope the images made by the 12 photographers who participated in ‘This Place’ will disrupt the conventional conversation about Israel and the West Bank, moving beyond the dual perspective of “for and against”, to enable people from around the world to understand the complexity and radical dissonance of the place and its many inhabitants. I believe that only through the language of artists, une parole poetique, can we begin to understand this place and its resonance for people around the world.
4. Did you face any difficulties while organizing the project and while shooting your body of work for ‘This Place’?
FB: We faced many challenges in organizing the project. We needed to identify the right photographers, raise the money to support their work, find the ideal assistant for each photographer, organize their residencies — and now that the work is complete, we continue to work to organize the exhibition tour, publish the books, and stimulate the conversation through education programs and a major digital initiative. Many people thought we would never succeed, but fortunately, we found a number of daring individuals — artists, sponsors, curators — who embraced this improbable dream and helped to make it happen.
5. There are exhibitions of ‘This Place’ confirmed internationally and each photographer will have their work published in a monograph. How do you estimate the shows and books impact on people to understand the overall project?
FB: The exhibition, which includes more than 500 photographs, opened in fall 2014 at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague and is now shown at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art before going to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, and then to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in early 2016. We expect the show to continue to travel for several years, including a tour in Asia, where we hope viewers in China will be able to see the photographs first hand. This global tour allows people from around the world to encounter the images face-to-face and to engage in live education programs, including discussions with the artists and other thinkers.
The project is also publishing 13 books, including a catalogue to accompany the exhibition and individual books by each of the 12 artists. These books show the full scope of the project, as most of the photographers produced far more work than can be included in the group exhibition. The books also allow readers who do not live in the cities where the exhibition will be held to experience the work in an intimate way.
6. In your opinion, if we compare ‘This Place’ to ‘Mission Héliographique’ or ‘FSA Project’, what are the similarities, and the differences between them?
FB: Like the ‘Mission Héliographique’ or ‘FSA Project’, ‘This Place’ gathers artists who use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. But ‘This Place’ is different in that we invited outsiders — photographers from around the world — to consider this place. Jeff Rosenheim, our curatorial consultant and the Director of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, put this better than I could:
“As a survey project, ‘This Place’ is essentially unprecedented. While the ‘Mission Heliographique’ (1851) featured French photographers carefully studying France and its architectural patrimony, and during the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration selected American artists to photograph America during the Great Depression (1930s), this effort is about overcoming the agenda of the place.”
7. In your opinion, what is the most important factor to ensure the success of a photographic project like ‘This Place’?
FB: The project has two goals: to be an incubator for great art and to spark new ways of seeing, thinking, and talking about Israel and the West Bank. We feel that we have already succeeded in achieving the first goal, through the great work of the participating artists, which is now being made available to viewers around the world through the exhibition, books and our ‘This Place’ website.
The second goal is more challenging and difficult to measure. This is a diverse and fragmented project (I think of the line of the great American poet Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”), and with no political agenda. We are not looking to promote a particular way of seeing or thinking about Israel and the West Bank. Rather, we are looking to disrupt the current shouting match and by creating faults and fissures to open up the possibility for real insights — insights about the place but also about ourselves. For this is above all a place of dissonance, of human polyphony and radical otherness that we cannot hope to understand until we confront and embrace the contradictions within ourselves — the estrangements, rifts and paradoxes that make up who we are.
8. What do you think about the future of documentary photography?
FB: I don’t think I can serve as a spokesperson for the future of documentary photography or for photography in general. I do think the tools of photography are changing rapidly. Ten of the 12 photographers in this project shot in film. With the continued rise of digital technologies, I don’t think that this will ever happen again in a group project. These digital tools are also changing the place of photographs in our lives — with more people able to make high quality images and to share those images instantaneously with thousands or even millions of people. I don’t know where these changes will lead, but I believe that the work of the artist — or at least my work as an artist — will remain at its core the same: to use the camera to ask questions about the world and ourselves.
This interview was first published in the Spring 2015 Edition of Chinese Photography Magazine ‘Photoworld’.
Discover more of the project on this-place.org
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