arts & life

photography

In Search Of The P

Jewish Angle

Shooting photographers in their

homes and studios, Penny Wolin tells a

story about Jewish vision.

Sandee Brawarsky | Special to the Jewish News

46 June 30 • 2016

enny Wolin has been
described as “a street
photographer who knocks
on the door.” She has the open-
ness, spontaneity and spirit of
the street, along with the gift of
conversation.
Working on her new book,
Descendants of Light: American
Photographers of Jewish Ancestry
(Crazy Woman Creek), she tra-
versed the country to meet pho-
tographers in their homes and
studios.
Wolin describes her practice as
both a portrait photographer and
a visual anthropologist, and feels
strongly about combining words
and images.
“It’s an interesting thing about
photography: A photograph can
definitely be worth a thousand
words,” she says. “But match a few
words with a good photograph
and you have told the whole
story.”
She spent more than eight years
on this project and met with more
than 65 photographers, including
Jay Maisel, Joel Meyerowitz, Bruce
Davidson, Annie Leibovitz and
Rosalind Solomon. For each, she
features a two-page spread includ-
ing excerpts from their conversa-
tions, and she has a good ear for
a telling quote. In her interviews,
she pushed these artists to articu-
late something about their pho-
tographic vision, their approach
to Judaism and whether they
see their work as photographers

as somehow connected to their
Jewish background.
Wolin also includes a photo of
each subject shared from a family
album, and then her own full-
page portrait of the person. At
the back of the book, she includes
an iconic photograph by each,
like Arnold Newman’s 1968 por-
trait of Leonard Bernstein at the
New York Philharmonic and Ira
Nowinski’s photograph of piles of
prisoner cutlery in Birkenau, shot
in 1988.
Elinor Carucci, who is pho-
tographed by Wolin curling her
eyelashes, tells her, “We make
photographs to remember how we
are and what our lives were. … I
don’t want to define [the essence
of photography] as Jewish, but
rather to perhaps define the
sensitivity to see it as something
Jewish.”
Wolin’s black-and-white photo-
graphs are stunning — they are
strong in composition and detail,
and reflect the intimacy she
achieves with her subjects. She
traveled in a converted Sprinter
van, retooled with cabinets, heat
and room for her and her dogs to
sleep.
She captures a straightforward
Annie Leibovitz with her hair
down. Ninety-three-year-old
Helen Levitt tells her, “Honey,
you’re not getting next to me with
a camera” — so Wolin shoots a
younger photograph of Levitt, in
her 93-year-old hands, against a

