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The ongoing war in Ukraine, instigated by Russia and now deep into its second year, has focused much of the world’s attention on the Eastern European nation that broke away from the former Soviet Union and declared its independence in December 1991. Ukraine has a rich and complicated Jewish heritage, remnants of a large community that was destroyed dur­ing the

Thanks to a recent article in Tablet Magazine, my extensive photographic work in Poland and more recently, western Ukraine, has begun to attract attention in the United States. Lisa Newman, the communications director at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., read that article and, after looking at my website, was sufficiently intrigued to contact me and ask me to

Almost since the beginning of photography, photographers concerned with the built environment have photographed industrial buildings. The development of photography both as a professional practice and as an art form coincided with Modernism, a cultural movement which emerged out of social changes brought on by industrialization and urbanization. Photography was both a by-product of Modernism, and its handmaiden, and therefore

I made my eleventh trip to Poland at the beginning of May, 2014, with the intention of photographing many historic Jewish sites, mostly cemeteries and synagogues, not visited on earlier trips. In seventeen days, my wife, Naomi, and I travelled a long arc though central Poland, starting with Bialystok in the north, all the way down to Katowice and then

The subject matter of the Early Sunday Morning exhibition, Toronto’s disappearing heritage buildings and streetscapes, got a lot of attention from Toronto media. One of the nicest reactions came from CBC Radio’s Matt Galloway, who talked with me at some length about the exhibition, its genesis and its importance for Toronto, on his top-rated morning show, Metro Morning. (The audio file is

I began making photographs of architecture and the urban landscape more than thirty years ago, a vocation inspired by my love for the city where I was born and grew up, Montreal. In the 1950s it was Canada’s largest and one of its oldest cities, and had a built environment of tremendous historic variety and richness. In the mid-1980s when

Yiddish was the first language of both my mother and father, and all my life I have regretted not learning more than a smattering of it. Like many immigrant Jews who arrived in Canada in the early part of the 2oth century, my parents spoke Yiddish at home and among their family and friends, most of whom were also recent

My own family has no direct connection with Poland or the Holocaust but I cannot remember a time when the fate of European Jewry has not held a central place in my imagination. As a child raised by immigrant parents in Montreal’s tradition – bound Jewish community in the decade after the Second World War, as a student at a

In his 1932 pamphlet entitled “The Disappearing City” and in subsequent writings, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed the creation of a utopian social environment that was neither urban nor rural, but a sprawling settlement of one-acre plots inhabited by families self-sufficient as farmers and artisans and bound together by, of all things, the growing ownership of private automobiles and trucks. It