Frédéric Brenner

Frédéric Brenner (b. 1959) is a French photographer best known for his opus Diaspora, the result of a twenty-five year search in over forty countries to create a visual record of the Jewish Diaspora at the end of the twentieth century. Initially intending to record vanishing Jewish communities before they disappeared, the project became a probing pursuit of the multiplicity of dissonant identities of individual Jews and of the Jewish people living among the nations. Along the way, Brenner directed three films and published five books, among them Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, which won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Visual Arts. Diaspora was also a major touring exhibition, which opened in 2003 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and traveled to nine other cities in the United States, Europe, and Mexico.

In 2007, Brenner launched a major new project, This Place, in which he invited eleven world-renowned photographers to join him in exploring Israel as place and metaphor—to use photography as tool to consider Israel as a living organism, with all its rifts and paradoxes. Central to the project is the notion of breaking free from the double perspective of 'for' or 'against,' perpetrator or victim. This Place is currently a major international touring exhibition, encompassed in a collective book, individual monographs, and a comprehensive digital platform. Brenner’s individual monograph, An Archaelogy of Fear and Desire, won the Audience Vote at the 2014 Fotobookfestival Kassel.
 

Brenner is a recipient of the Prix Niépce (1981) and was nominated the Laureate of the French Academy in Rome (1992). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée de L’ysée in Lausanne, as well as many private collections.