Zerheilt Photography Exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin

SecondMann was lying naked on the gray ground stomped by footprints, and his tattooed back was covered with two columns of German sentences. The other is sitting on a children’s swing in front of the wall of the house full of graffiti. One-third of the people were divided into two, half with a beard, wearing a leather cap and a gown cut in half, and the other half with a shaved beard, wearing a blue shirt and a striped tie. A woman in a red dress is sitting in a room full of picture frames; in many there are family photos. Another young woman is lying under her bicycle among the autumn leaves. A heavily pregnant woman, with her right hand on her bulged belly, stands behind a wooden table, next to a man in a sweatshirt with a beard; in the painting between them, you can see the legs of a giraffe .An old couple poses in front of a glass cabinet with leftovers from the breakfast room of the Grand Hotel Berlin Esplanade Sony center. Behind the two, under the reflection of the glass, there was a rush of traffic on Potsdamer Platz.

If you look at the photos of photographer Frédéric Brenner exhibited on the theme “Zerheilt” at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, you might think of the author’s famous miniature in the essay volume “Couples, Passers-by”. Botto Strauss think. Because here, you can also see people, individuals, couples, minorities, and photo viewers who seem to get along with themselves completely, immersed in their wandering. But Brenner chose a different method of observation than Strauss. His photos are portraits designed by people, portraying themselves, and finishing in the eyes of the photographer. Every photo is a conversation. Every room is a stage. Everyone has a role, a role, and a voice.

Another point is very important. The people in the picture are not accidental acquaintances, nor passers-by. They are almost all of Jewish descent, some from Israel, some from the United States, and many are part of Berlin’s cultural life. Brenner’s series of photos that put them together shows a part of humanity on the one hand, and a special community on the other. Their symbols are rarely seen in pictures, here is a rabbi hat, there is a kippah, there are Hebrew characters on the board. But you can find them. They connect the views and self-portraits of the people you see here with the history, religion and culture of a nation, the Holocaust and its origin in Berlin.

Berlin has become “a city obsessed with salvation”, Frédéric Brenner wrote in his exhibition catalogue introduction. Judaism is staged and celebrated everywhere, “from theater to Krezmer to Jewish cuisine”, but this revival usually doesn’t feel like an act of healing, but a new form of distortion. From this perspective, Brenner’s photo is a kind of inversion. They did not show the protagonist that they were Jewish, but for themselves. You participate in their sense of the world.