The Contact-Sheet Synagogue: Transactions in Monuments, Documents, and Archives.
The synagogue’s architectural and institutional form has continuously mutated and transformed throughout history. Often, the synagogue has taken any shape that was given or available, and only in periods of political stability there have been moments of great formal exercises. The most important and unusual of these transformations, this thesis argues, was its documentation through photography in the post-war period. While many of the synagogues were either destroyed or used for other purposes by other communities, they continue to exist on photographs.
In the 1950s and 1960s extensive surveys of synagogues were conducted in Poland. The large collection of photographs, produced between 1961 and 1967, documents the architectures of diasporas, in which the political position of minority subjects within a state are inscribed. Dispersed and relocated, they remain in archives around the world. The resulting records constitute an important corpus of the many shapes synagogues have taken in the past centuries.
During this period of documentation, the buildings’ historical and political presence shifted from central political institutions of religious communities to national heritage. Once photographed, the synagogues gained remote celebrity in the production of Jewish secular historiography. Archives and cultural institutions strived to preserve and present the monuments that were assigned to an irrevocable past. In Israel’s process of “ingathering the exiles of the past,” the European synagogue became an object fought for, possessed, traded, sought after, rejected and deposited.
This project seeks to convey the architectural history of the European synagogue through its mediatic change, by analyzing the documentation and representation practices of an unstable diaspora architecture. In so doing, it analyzes how synagogues experienced an epistemological shift from being understood as built artifacts of fragile diaspora congregations to documents that have spread along the lines of geographical reconfigurations. The project reflects on an architectural history of an object without a site. It is less interested in the preservation practices that have succeeded to mechanically and digitally prevent architecture from destruction or decay. It instead closely looks at the built, material traces of this transformation. The built apparatus that enabled the European synagogue to perpetuate, was the same that conceptualized it as an object of national heritage.