Bruce Katsiff: Jewish Philly Photographer Looks Again on Prolonged Profession

Bruce Katsiff’s dad and mom had been Jewish immigrants, so, like many immigrant dad and mom, they cared deeply about schooling. They wished all three of their sons to go to varsity and work towards a sensible profession path.

Katsiff started his personal school expertise as a pre-law scholar, however he dropped out to review pictures on the Rochester Institute of Technology. His dad and mom weren’t thrilled about it, however the son was dedicated to the trail that had gripped him for the reason that popularization of single-lens reflex know-how, which allowed the photographer to see by way of the lens what can be captured on movie, within the early Sixties.

It additionally turned out to be a reasonably sensible path.

Katsiff went on to have a photograph featured on the Museum of Modern Art in New York City whereas nonetheless a school scholar. That obtained him gigs at museums across the nation. It additionally led to a educating and administrative profession at Bucks County Community College and the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown.

The photographer helped discovered the latter, and from now by way of Aug. 2, it’s honoring his life’s work with a retrospective exhibition, “Pieces of a Life.”

The exhibition contains pictures from all of Katsiff’s collections over his six a long time as an artist. Those embrace River Town Portraits, of the buddies he made after he moved out of Philadelphia to Lumberville, on the Delaware River, within the Nineteen Seventies, and Nature Morte, his assortment of pictures of posed animal stays.

Those began when Katsiff discovered a dying raccoon that had been hit by a automobile in his Lumberville backyard at some point. It fashioned the idea of a creative philosophy he nonetheless holds.
“I’m not trying to make pretty pictures of sunsets or pretty pictures by the ocean,” Katsiff defined. “I spend a lot of time looking at subject matter we’re supposed to turn away from, and seeing if we can find beauty in it.”

Katsiff’s philosophy shall be on show in 60 pictures curated by artwork historian Dorothy Fisher.

“Bruce Katsiff had a monumental impact on the Michener Art Museum as an institution, and we are delighted to welcome him back as a contemporary artist,” mentioned Executive Director and CEO Anne Corso in a press launch. “I hope this exhibition gives our visitors a fuller picture of the remarkable man who built such a legacy for the artistic community of Bucks County and beyond.”

Katsiff’s footage are held within the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst others. But over the course of his profession, he has additionally constructed establishments.

He helped launch the artwork division at Bucks County Community College, his first job out of faculty.

“The community college movement was starting in America. There was a missionary zeal. We were helping kids try out college,” he recalled.

At 27, he was elected chair of the division, and he grew to get pleasure from administrative work. He mentioned he introduced six Guggenheim fellows to show at Bucks, and at one time, Princeton University and Yale University raided the neighborhood school’s school.

In 1989, he took over as founding director of the Michener Art Museum, a undertaking he helped launch with a Nineteen Seventies analysis paper for the Philadelphia Arts Council on the opportunity of a regional museum. In the late Eighties, arts council members began asking him if he may make it occur.

Together, these members and Katsiff obtained Bucks County commissioners to donate the property that was as soon as a Quaker jail. One of the commissioners knew the well-known creator James A. Michener, who lived in Doylestown. Michener agreed to lend his identify to the undertaking if the organizers may show it had neighborhood help.

They did, and he ended up writing checks, too, in accordance with Katsiff.

“It was Michener’s good name that helped to galvanize a lot of support for the institution,” he mentioned.

Katsiff has made a profession out of his ardour. He mentioned he by no means would have believed it himself if it weren’t for nice Jews within the arts like composer Leonard Bernstein. The artist describes himself as extra of a cultural Jew.

“The Jews are smart people, and they accomplish a lot. Look at that incredible influence they’ve had on American culture,” he mentioned. “Those traditions helped me say, ‘This might be a path I can take, too.’”

Katsiff has helped make it doable for different younger Jews and artists on the whole to take an identical path. But he additionally fears for the way forward for his artwork type. As he defined, “99.9% of photos that are made never exist as physical objects” right now.

“They exist as fleeting images on a computer screen, or on an iPhone screen,” he mentioned.

“And there’s an even more profound change happening. Up until now, if we saw a photograph, we generally believed that it was true,” he continued. “Photographs that are created by AI have no relationship to reality. What now happens is we’re going to assume that it’s a fake until we believe that it’s true.”

“I don’t think we can do anything other than understand it,” he concluded.

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