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“PHOTOS OF JEWISH LIFE IN AUSTIN”, Betsy Woldman
About the artist: Betsy Woldman is an Austin-based documentary photographer whose work explores the intersections of culture, community and social change. With a career spanning over two decades, including her tenure as photographer for the City of Austin, she uses her camera as a tool for storytelling, connection and Collective memory. Her current work focuses on capturing stories of continuity and transformation within contemporary Jewish communities. Through portraits, rituals, and everyday moments, she reveals what it means to belong and how people sustain tradition, adapt to new realities, and find meaning in connection.
“UNTITLED”, Burt Allen Solomon
About the artist: Born in 1944 and educated through college in Brooklyn, New York, now living in the New Jersey suburbs, where he and his wife raised their two daughters, Burt has been making photographs since 1961. Without formal photographic training but with an informal introduction by his father to photography and his assistance in setting up my first darkroom, he has been making silver-gelatin prints for over 65 years. Much of that time, he practiced law in New York City and happily now has the opportunity to expand his attention to photography. Having several exhibits, both solo and collective, under his belt, he still enjoys both making photographs and exhibiting them where viewers may contemplate them.
A note from the artist: My photographs submitted to The Artists Against Antisemitism Third Annual Community Arts Project allude to aspects of the American-Jewish/Jewish-American journey (I see no difference between these two phrases). In my family’s journey, my mother’s family left Russia for Palestine (as Israel was called then), probably in the 1890’s or very early 1900’s, later went back to Russia, and then came to the United States in time for my mother to be born in New York City around 1905. My father’s family lived in New York City, where my grandfather arrived from Russia-Rumania around the 1890’s and established his own printing business on the Lower East Side in 1907, the year my father was born. We have been part of the Jewish experience in America since then. The submitted photographs reference generational relations in modern Israel, where American-Jews/Jewish Americans have long visited in exploring their heritage, a January 2020 Jewish Solidarity March in Manhattan, fueled by recent antisemitic events, and the introduction at the same Jewish Solidarity March of a younger man by an older Orthodox man to the Jewish practice of donning tefillin, all reflections of aspects of how Jews in the United States now address their Jewish identity.
“UNTITLED”, Connie Springer
A note from the artist: Several years ago I produced a photo essay/narrative on adoptive families. My subjects here were Judy, a rabbi, and Lizzie, her spunky daughter. I loved the attitude in this photo.
About the artist: Connie Springer is a watercolor artist and photographer with a penchant for storytelling. In both media, she demonstrates a keen visual sense and a strong interest in people. Her style has been described as evocative and interpretive.
UNTITLED, Joanna Dreifus
A note from the artist: I snapped this photo moments before my son’s Bar Mitzvah. My father, the only child of his German Jewish refugee parents, is straightening his grandson’s tie at Chelsea Piers in NYC, in view of Ellis Island where our family arrived in NYC seventy years earlier.
About the artist: Joanna Dreifus is the proud granddaughter of German Jewish refugees.