Laurence Salzmann: A Life with Others
Jason Francisco, Guest Curator
A Life with Others is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Laurence Salzmann (American, born 1944), one of Philadelphia’s most renowned living photographers. The exhibition explores the major themes of the artist’s remarkable and ongoing fifty-year career, the geographic scope of his practice in photography, and the intensity of his concerns.
Salzmann is a lifelong resident of Philadelphia; he remains today a member of the same synagogue in which he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1957. But his work has taken him to communities in more than a dozen countries around the globe, his subjects ranging from rural Mexico to urban Turkey, the mountains of Transylvania to the highlands of Peru, New York City to Jerusalem, Cairo to Havana.
Trained in visual anthropology, Salzmann is distinct in his conception of art as research, and research as a point of artistic departure. His photographs and films push us to measure our ethical consciousness and to meet his subjects on their own terms, with critical awareness and compassion. They push us to defend those who are vulnerable to ignorance and stereotype, and to transcend cultural and psychological barriers in the protection of human dignity.
The exhibition will include over seventy-five works of art, including vintage photographs from all eras of Salzmann’s career as well as his books.
Salzmann’s work can be found in collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot, Tel Aviv; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; and the Jewish Museum of New York. His achievements include a Pew Fellowship in Photography (2001); the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship Award in Photography (2001); a Fulbright Fellowship in Photography (1974-76); an American Film Institute Grant (1970), and a silver medal at the Venice Film Festival (1971). In 2018, the University of Pennsylvania acquired Salzmann’s vast archive.
Jason Francisco (born 1967, California) is an artist and essayist. Joining documentary and conceptual art, his photoworks and writings focus on the complications of historical memory, and new directions in the art of witness. Much of his work concerns the inheritance of trauma, specifically concerning Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Francisco’s large-scale projects include Alive and Destroyed: A Meditation on the Holocaust in Time (Daylight Books, 2021), Autobiography of an Unknown American (2021), The Camp in its Afterlives (2010-2018), An Unfinished Memory (2014-2018), After the American Century (2002-2018), Big City (1990-2020), Far from Zion: Jews, Diaspora, Memory (Stanford University Press, 2006), and The Villages: Rural India at the End of the Twentieth Century (1990-1997). He is also the author of numerous limited edition photobooks, web-based installations, experimental films, hybrid photo-text writings, reportages, essays, and poems in translation. He received his education at Columbia University, King’s College London, and Stanford University.
