A member of the prestigious Magnum agency since 1985, he also does numerous reports outside France. His activity thus leads him to South Africa for the release of Nelson Mandela; in Chile in the footsteps of former political prison camps; in Rwanda from where, six years after the genocide of the Tutsis, he brought back portraits of survivors. It was also the year he made the trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his paternal grandparents were murdered, stateless Polish Jews, immigrants to France after the First World War, arrested and deported in 1942. In counterpoint, in the 2010s, he returned to Poland and Ukraine where he followed joyful Hasidic pilgrimages, like so many “timeless” rites.
Finally, he makes the “reverse trip” to Algeria and eastern Morocco where his mother is from, on the vestiges of this Judaism of North Africa present since time immemorial and which is no longer today. Today in the Maghreb only a “disappeared world” like that of the Yiddishland of his paternal family. He then crosses the destinies of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, which he recounts in the film Mare Mater.
The exhibition presents some two hundred works including many unpublished photographs, from the end of the 1970s to the years 2015, accompanied by comments by the author, and a film, La Mémoire de mon père. She reveals to us a humanist gaze, nourished by the Jewish experience and inhabited by the universal questions of exile, disappearance and oblivion.
Patrick Zachman
Memory trips
26 May – 20 August 2023
Kunstfoyer
Maximilianstr. 53
80530 München
www.versicherungskammer-kulturstiftung.de
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
© Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos
