“Jews in Photography”: Conceiving a Field in the Papers of Peter Pollack

Abstract

This article explores the initial attempt to write a comprehensive overview of the involvement of Jews in photography. To the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Judaica in the late 1960s, it was self-evident that Jews were represented well out of proportion to their number in the field of photography, and therefore, their project demanded that this be dealt with in a general article and individual entries. Peter Pollack, a pioneering curator and historian of photography, was selected to edit this sub-section. Pollack immediately devised a broad and penetrating survey. But his efforts were severely constrained because the editors did not deem this area to be very significant, and because the basic research they promised Pollack about Jews in photography simply did not exist. They were not about to undertake such an original, complicated and far-flung effort. Pollack's intuition, that this comprised both an important element of modern Jewish history and the history of photography, only came to partial fruition in the Judaica. But his papers held at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) will be tremendously helpful for scholars wishing to further investigate the question of Jews and photography.