A Workshop with Frédéric Brenner

“Taking a photograph is like an embrace.” This is how internationally renowned photographer Frédéric Brenner opened a virtual workshop conducted with University of Virginia students in March 2022. In only four sessions, Mr. Brenner guided students—most of whom had no formal experience in photography—through urgent questions of our time and of our local place: How can photography build bridges of intimacy? How can it negotiate strangeness? How can it be attentive to social inequity, violence, and trauma without voyeurism? How can a photographer build trust and document what often appears most personal to us?

Frédéric Brenner’s own work and lifelong practice in documentary photography, which includes widely acclaimed exhibitions and books, such as Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (1978 – 2003), Archeology of Fear and Desire (2009 – 2012), and Zerheilt: Healed to Pieces (2021), served as the primary impulse to think about these questions and as an example of how photography can engage with local communities and function as a medium not only of seeing but also of listening and storytelling.

The workshop and exhibition were sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program, the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion, and the Vice Provost for the Arts. To learn more about Frédéric Brenner and his upcoming in-person residency, please visit https://brenneratuva.virginia.edu/.

Jewish Studies faculty member Asher Biemann chats with a student after his introductory remarks at the gallery opening.

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An audience gathers for the gallery opening in Nau-Gibson Hall.

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Below image credit: Thien-Kim Dinh, From Seeing the Unseen (2022)

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