Photographing Europe’s Lost Jewish Heritage

Back in 1992, David Kaufman, an acclaimed photographer and an award-winning documentary filmmaker, was in Poland doing research for CBC television on Polish child survivors of the Holocaust. His trip coincided with the discovery of a Jewish burial site near Warsaw. The tombstones of the former Jewish cemetery were lined up and standing vertically. “I …

Photographing Eastern Europe’s Fading Jewish Architecture

Photographer David Kaufman looks at the world through a historical lens. Quite literally, in fact, as he shoots with bellows, the folding attachment used on cameras since the Civil War. Though Kaufman is fascinated by the past, his old-fashioned equipment has a more practical purpose: the bellows prevent the converging vertical lines that would otherwise …

The “Gardens of Memory” of Ukraine

Few people would be able to see beauty in an old and neglected cemetery in Eastern Europe, but to photographer David Kaufman, old Jewish cemeteries are precious “gardens of memory.” Kaufman, a Toronto-based photographer and documentary filmmaker, has been taking still photos of Jewish heritage sites since 2007, and went to western Ukraine in June …

David Kaufman’s Early Sunday Morning shows a bygone Toronto

Early Sunday Morning, David Kaufman’s current photo exhibition, is a love letter to Toronto’s historic streetscapes. The stars of the show are three-storey brick buildings that line both Queen St. W. and E., many dating back to the 1880s. Even as downtown Toronto becomes more dominated every year by new condo towers, Kaufman find himself …

Short Takes on Early Sunday Morning

NOW Magazine, May 23, 2013: ART: Contact Photography Festival Can’t-miss exhibitions in the mammoth photography festival: David Kaufman Twist Gallery, 1100 Queen St W By Fran Schechter Calling his show Early Sunday Morning after an Edward Hopper painting, photographer/filmmaker Kaufman channels the luminous stillness of Hopper’s early 20th-century urban scenes in order to pay homage …

Photographers Preserve Places of Prayer

The places where we pray are part of us. The physical buildings host baby namings, bar mitzvahs, weddings and Kaddish prayers, as well as community gatherings of dear faces that uphold us through our lifetimes. corporated into its exterior masonry. This is why the exhibition of more than 30 photos that opened in early December …

Photography Exhibition Tells A Tale of Two Cities

The late Jane Jacobs, who loved taking walks through many of Toronto’s more modest neighbourhoods, would have loved David Kaufman’s intriguing photography exhibition The Disappearing City. Kaufman puts the spotlight not on huge well-known buildings like the Inn on the Park, which was shockingly obliterated this week, but on the kind of small, eccentric buildings …