DMV Photographer Seeks to Make Klezmer Seen

With each click on of the shutter, Lloyd Wolf captures musicians sustaining a Jewish custom that almost died out within the wake of the Holocaust. He may very well be the primary to take action — Wolf’s exhibition is the one identified photographic archive of the klezmer world.

The Arlington-based photographer has spent the previous three a long time documenting klezmer music, an Eastern European Jewish instrumental people style. His photographs now adorn the partitions of Fairfax’s Pozez Jewish Community Center in an exhibition titled “A Joyful Noise.”

“I photographed some of the original purveyors of the music,” Wolf advised Washington Jewish Week.

Wolf’s photograph assortment is cemented in a titular book that was printed in 2025 by the Klezmer Institute. True to the identify, the 45 photographs in “A Joyful Noise” depict musicians with their eyes closed in ardour or their mouths broad open mid-song.

“I was trying to make an invisible art form visible,” Wolf defined. “You can’t see music, so how do you convey that energy?”

The reply lies throughout the topics’ facial expressions and physique language and thru “dynamic lighting.”

One of Wolf’s favorites of the bunch is a photograph of Frank London of The Klezmatics performing, by which solely the trumpeter’s eye is in sharp focus. Sometimes, Wolf may even use photograph modifying methods for enhanced visible results.

Klezmer stays an “extremely niche” style that isn’t extensively identified exterior of a small, passionate Jewish group.

“The music had almost died out because, after the founding of Israel and after World War II, taste shifted from the music that had come over from Europe, … and [klezmer] music stopped being so popular,” Wolf stated.

Many American Jews as a substitute listened to conventional Israeli songs, he stated.

Wolf himself didn’t develop up consciously listening to klezmer music — his German father most well-liked Mozart. But Wolf generally heard the style. “My mother’s parents were from a little village in Eastern Europe, and they had Yiddish radio on when I would go visit,” he recalled.

His decades-long archival undertaking started with a piece project from B’nai B’rith International Jewish Monthly of Washington. Jeff Rubin, Wolf’s editor on the journal, despatched him to New York to cowl the klezmer revival of the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties.

“Here’s a couple bands in New York. Go up and photograph them,” Rubin had advised him.

The bands included Kapelye — one in every of just a few klezmer bands performing within the United States on the time — and The Klezmatics — which nonetheless exist right this moment in New York City. Wolf photographed the band rehearsals utilizing a movie digital camera.

“I liked it, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the music. I was paying attention to the pictures,” he stated.

The turning level got here at a membership in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Wolf and Frank London, one of many founders of The Klezmatics, “really hit it off” over a meal. “And then they played, and they were just astonishing,” Wolf stated. “They weren’t Grammy winners yet — they were kids.”

He stored photographing The Klezmatics just a few extra instances and photographed another klezmer bands. “I got more interested in the music, and over time, I started collecting a bunch of this stuff,” stated Wolf, referring to photographs of klezmer artists.

Having already printed two books on Jewish topics, Wolf tried to pitch his photograph assortment to his agent to no avail.

“It turned out that was a good thing because I had another bunch of years to continue photographing,” he stated. “I started going to a lot of shows, and the pictures were fun.”

Wolf turned the “go-to guy” for a lot of musicians once they wanted a photographer. He additionally served as an artist-in-residence, instructing a category in Canada, and created album cowl artwork for bands. He has photographed tons of of bands and particular person performers, starting from the internationally acknowledged to small group ensembles.

“[I] then realized at some point that I had a body of work that was large enough and interesting,” Wolf stated. “It turned out there was no one else doing it. There’s a lot of people that photograph the blues or rap or bluegrass — all these different music genres — … and I realized this is something the community didn’t have.”

Drawing inspiration from jazz images of the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, Wolf describes his photographs as “historic.”

“I’d photographed some of the people from my parents’ generation,” he stated. “I’ve been doing it since ‘92, and so this captures a period of change in time.”

Such historic documentation is necessary on condition that many authentic listeners of klezmer are not dwelling. “A couple of older people are still alive, but very, very few,” Wolf stated.

“This is the music that our grandparents danced to, mourned to, got married to, partied to, and it is related, in many ways, to the music that is in the synagogue traditionally,” he stated.

Even although the sound dates again centuries, the tunes aren’t removed from Hasidic niggunim, or wordless melodies, Wolf stated: “When people hear it, it sounds familiar, even if they don’t even know it. It just grabs.”

“I just like klezmer music. A lot. And I trust the pictures convey some sense of what I find so compelling about it,” Wolf told Sarah Berry, the curator of Bodzin Art Gallery.

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