Ahron D. Weiner

I see life through the lens of experience, and choose to capture my vision of life through the lens of my camera. I shoot both the abstract and the representational–antipodes within life’s ambiguity. Camerawork is, in its most sentimental form, lifework: to see beauty in the everyday, to pause and capture the common, to look at the overlooked, to remark the unremarkable. I am reminded of this, paradoxically perhaps, when I travel, and so I have done much photography in countries that are foreign to me but somehow native to what I want to see, to what I need to see.

Art history and Jewish history are two influences, certainly. The history of art imparted the importance of color, line, perspective, composition - the entire painterly education that doesn't just instruct in canvas analysis but improves the eye and mind. Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust imparted the importance of remembrance, and instilled in me (through snapshots and family albums) the paramount role of photography in that discipline. Indeed, in our technological age, memory both individual and collective seems to me the most imperiled discipline, and photography its only, but imperfect, hope. Two of my multiyear projects explore aspects of Jewish loss and renewal in Eastern Europe - a part of the world I spent three years wandering by car and train, and still return to annually.


I work over ideas, and multiple series (Eastern Europe; rural Ukraine; images of obsolete advertisements; images of falconry; images that use absinthe as a filter, etc.), concurrently, for years, and allow for crosspollination, sudden inspirations, miraculous "mistakes." Photography, for me, is iterative, personal: Each image is its own universe; just as each person I photograph is unique, just as each element of light I capture comes from a newer day.