THE JEWISH WEEK — February 10, 2016 — It’s extremely rare for 12 photographers to show their work together. Photographer Frederic Brenner not only convinced 11 of his renowned colleagues from around the world to share in an exhibition, but to first spend six months in Israel — where most had never been — and present their own photographic vision. The result of his remarkably ambitious project, “This Place,” with more than 600 photographs on view, opens this Friday at the Brooklyn Museum and runs through June 5th.

Brenner, along with Jeff Rosenheim, curator-in-charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photography, treated Jewish Week readers and others to a sneak preview of the exhibition, at a Jewish Week Forum at Temple Emanuel’s Skirball Center last Thursday evening.

“Israel is a place of metaphor… of radical optimists,” Brenner observed. “It engages viewers in a conversation.”

“Seeing is a creative act,” Rosenheim said. Each photographer was “looking for that thing they had never seen before, never felt before.”

Several of the participating photographers were present as Brenner and Rosenheim showed and commented on the work. Their longtime association was evident in the natural back-and-forth between the two. They also showed a video about the making of the $6 million project, which took several years to complete.

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