Gary Beeber
"Photographs from the Jewish Cemeteries of the Saints, Morocco"
July 18 – October 15, 2002
Artist's reception: Wednesday, September 18, 2002, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011

Photographs from the Jewish Cemeteries of the Saints, Morocco
The American Sephardi Federation located at the Center for Jewish History is pleased to announce the exhibition, "Photographs from the Jewish Cemeteries of the Saints, Morocco." The show will include nearly twenty color, Duraflex prints by artist, Gary Beeber, which depict gravestones from two cemeteries in Morocco, sites of burial for important Jewish saints.

Gary Beeber has long been interested in photographing sites characterized by death, including abstracted details of the tomb of Marie Leveau in New Orleans, the site of Gianni Versace's murder in Miami Beach, decaying cemeteries in Old San Juan, and the crematorium at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. The artist's fascination, however, is not with morbidity. Rather, the subject of Beeber's images is born of his interest in what he terms as "a more personal form of history." The artist has traveled literally around the globe in order to document a wide array of visually striking architectural details, including those found on tombstones, gleaning information concerning our human past through the lenses of many diverse cultures.

When the artist arrived in Morocco in 2001, he hired load Musket guides (who incidentally possessed only a very limited command of the English language). Beeber asked his guides to take him to any cemeteries of note in the area. Fortuitously, the men thought to take the photographer to two Jewish cemeteries - one in Fes and one in Sefrou (a tiny town on the outskirts of the larger city} - which the artist only later learned to be among famous sites of veneration for Moroccan Sephardic Jews because of the burial there of a number of revered saints. However, unaware of the religious import of these locales, Beeber simply focused his attention on photographing the elegant and refined decorative forms of the tombs, in addition to the extensive and often complex textual inscriptions carved into the stones. It was only weeks later, after having returned to the United States, that Beeber learned of the significance of the sites and of particular graves that he had shot. It was not until then that his project truly came to life. Beeber commissioned translations of the elaborate and poetic Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew texts documented by his images. A portion of one of the inscriptions as translated by Neil Kitainik follows:
"Requested in the Heavenly Academy, a seedling of holiness, all of him a delight . . . He departed in splendor . . . a Rabbinical scholar who died while yet in his youth, indeed at 19 years . . . Behold he is the venerable sage, young yet wise, His Honor the Esteemed Rabi, Sand Achtiboli, may his memory be a blessing, who was taken up on the 6th day, the 29th of the month of this tragic Exile, in the year 5631 (1871) from creation . . ."

Seven translations accompany Beeber's crystalline light-filled photographs in this important exhibition.

All artworks on display are available for purchase through ClampArt, 250 West 27* Street, Loft 1C. For more information please contact either Mazol Ustaev at the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History, +1 - 212 - 294.8350, or Brian Paul Clamp at ClampArt, +1 - 646 - 234.0020.

All artworks on display are available for purchase through ClampArt
250 West 27th Street, Loft 1C
For more information please contact either Mazol Ustaev at the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History, +1 - 212 - 294.8350, or Brian Paul Clamp at ClampArt, +1 - 646 - 230.0020.