Temple

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Artist's Statement

    The first time I visited the site of the First Romanian Congregation, I was unprepared for what I would see. Although I had read about the roof of this historic synagogue collapsing, I was shocked by the reality of it. The grand balconies still stood, but the entire front half of the building had been erased.  A few teenagers moved aside a wooden panel set up by a construction crew to keep people away and snuck onto the plot.  I followed them, then told them they shouldn’t cause any trouble, that it was a holy place.  They left quickly, taking a few pictures with their cellular phones.  I felt overwhelmed seeing the prayer books, or, rather, scraps of prayer books, covers torn off, sprinkled among the fallen bricks.  When I left, after walking around the ruins for several hours I felt the smell of death followed me. 

    I found myself making pilgrimages to this temple many times.  I was continuously drawn to the ruins where my grandmother attended services as a tenement-living Lower East Side immigrant.  The series began to take form, allowing me to explore themes of time and its dilapidating effect on structure, and the presence of people through their objects instead of their beings. Furthermore, these objects transcend their mundane origin of book, cloth, lamp, by absorbing the spirituality of the place, serving as ritual objects, bible, prayer cloth, ceremonial light. These photographs gain purpose as an act of memorial, capturing a site before it was swept from the earth.  Many of the images were taken with a short depth of field in low lighting, such that the objects appear to float, ghost-like.  I also used high-speed film to emphasize the grain, giving the viewer a visceral gritty feeling, the sensation I felt while taking the photographs.  

    One influence on this series was Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated.  The archeological way I collected photographs of pieces of abandoned relics seemed to echo his character of Jonathan, also a collector, or the elderly Augustine, who preserved the memory of her townspeople by storing their objects in boxes after they were all killed.  Another influence was Manuel Piña’s photographic series entitled Time; I found myself entranced by the peeling paint and fading décor in Cuba and sought to capture the same decay within the Rivington Street temple. 

    Working on this series brought back memories from my own life.  The years of negligence it must have taken for the once-grand synagogue to have reached its wrecked state reminded me of many edifices in Ivory Coast, where I attended high school.  During the boom time of the 1960s, high rises soared, but in the depression that followed for the next thirty years, carpets were stained and worn thin, paint chipped in chunks, and other signs of aging wore through the opulence.  The buildings remained as a memory of that time of prosperity.  I also recalled the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which flattened much of Kobe, Japan, while I was a middle school student there.  Many of the pre-war homes were built to withstand hurricanes, with heavy rooftops that would resist being blown away.  This proved disastrous for earthquakes: as the supporting walls shook, the rooftops plunged down.   From one day to the next, a bustling city became the facade of a war zone.  Treading among the ruins of the First Romanian Congregation I felt as though I was back in Kobe, the day of the earthquake, but when I looked at the peeling paint I also saw that it had taken years of negligence to reach its current state.

    These were some of my thoughts and influences while working on this series, exploring themes of viewing an entity through pieces, decay, and ultimately, remembrance.