Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/698448
46 June 30 • 2016 P 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 arts & life p h o t o g r a p h y Shooting photographers in their homes and studios, Penny Wolin tells a story about Jewish vision. In Search Of The Jewish Angle Sandee Brawarsky | Special to the Jewish News