The Last Chapter? A Lecture by Tomasz StrugA Look at Photography Projects Devoted to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s
A Lecture by Tomasz Strug
In the 1970s and 1980s, at least a few photographers realized larger projects situated on the brink of art, report, and visual anthropology which dealt with the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. A common concept of the time is that these projects documented yet another end of Jewish history. The most important projects are the ones by Laurence Salzmann and Chuck Fishman. Salzmann photographed the community of Radowce, Romania, while Fishman took his photographs in Poland. Both are American Jewish artists who decided to work on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The lecture will focus mainly on these two projects, but will be discussed in the larger context of similar projects by Edward Serotta, Tomasz Tomaszewski, and the monumental project by Frederic Brenner, who substantially went far beyond the frames of the European continent. The aim of the lecture is to determine if there are any common social and cultural roots among these authors’ works. We will also focus on the photographs, and the style in which they depict Jewish life a few decades after the Shoah.
In Polish
