A welcome change of pace

I know I've been a bad, bad blogger the past two weeks. October and November are always my two busiest months--the former chock full of weddings, the latter chock full of holiday portraits--so you'll pardon the slight letup in posts. It's hard enough just keeping up with the constant downloading of memory cards, ten gigs here and eight gigs there, a task that keeps me up well into the wee hours of each morning. Blogging seemed pretty low on the to-do list.

Well, I'm happy to say that I'm back. Not necessarily rested, but back nonetheless. The last two weeks have offered me a welcome change. After more than 400 consecutive weddings in the last nine years (go ahead, do the math) I switched gears in a big way these past two weekends: I shot two back-to-back B'nai Mitzvahs.

To say that I'm not exactly known as a Bar Mitzvah photographer is an understatement. Outside of the two I shot several years back for my friend Judy Schlosser of P Street Pictures, the Georgetown shop where I frame all my work, I've haven't shot another Bar or Bat Miztvah ever. I mean, I was Bar Mitzvahed once, but that was in 1975, and we'll get to that in a little bit.

But sometimes ignorance can be a blessing in disguise. Nine years ago, when I started shooting weddings, people kept seeking me out precisely because I didn't shoot weddings. I was at the White House every day back then, and brides and grooms seemed excited by the fact that I wasn't some dorky wedding photographer, shooting hand-on-hand closeups and pictures of the bride's shoes.

(To this day, I still don't understand the fascination wedding photographers have with a bride's shoes. Do they think that brides are so fragile and so insecure that they need documentation of their freshly-dyed DSW shoes? All the more reason to love my October 21 bride, Christy Trew, who couldn't wait to get rid of her shoes and don a pair of cowboy boots.)

Anyway, wedding clients still come to me all these years later because of my "outsider" status, though I'm not sure one can still qualify as an outsider after doing the same thing 400 times. But that's where the Kaplan, Mendelson (no relation) and Macklin families come in. Just like with the weddings, these families were looking for a non-Bar Mitzvah Bar Mitzvah photographer. That wasn't hard to give them, since I was blissfully unaware of what Bar Mitzvah photography look like, though I knew I didn't really want to find out.

(I'm using the masculine, singular form of the celebration here: Bar Mitzvah. Obviously, the feminine is Bat Mizvah. But in both cases these past two weeks I was shooting a B'nai Mitzvah, the plural form. On November 4 it was brother and sister Samantha and Jack Kaplan at Washington Hebrew Congregation; on November 11 cousins Oliver Macklin and Amanda Mendelson took their turns on the bima at Adas Israel.)

And these two events certainly came at an appropriate time. Given the fact that for the last two months I've been quite occupied with promoting my brother Daniel's bestseller, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (named this week as Amazon's #2 history book of 2006) it would be hard not to think about a Bar Mitzvah with out thinking of our very first trip for that project. In 2001 I traveled with my three siblings to Bolechow, in Ukraine, and saw the the synagogue (above) where my grandfather and his brother Shmiel were both Bar Mitzvahed, circa 1915. My grandfather survived, his brother didn't. And the synagogue where they read from the Torah is now a municipal depot, a sad, shuttered reminder of the the thousands of Jews who lived and were later murdered in the tiny town.

Worlds apart and almost a century removed, the weeks--if not years-- of preparation that Oliver and Amanda and Samantha and Jack went through for their big day is probably not all that different from the time spent practicing by my grandfather and his brother for their Bar Mitzvahs. Cynics will say that Bar Mitzvahs are now huge events compared to a century ago. Yeah, and movies were two for a nickel and all that. The celebrations may be bigger, but the ceremonies remain largely the same. I watched four young men and women take their responsibilities very seriously these past two weeks. They were poised and serious inside their respective synagogues, far more mature than I remember myself at that same age.

I was Bar Mitzvahed in 1975, the last week of the year. I can't boast that I was a very good Bar Mitzvah candidate back then. I remember the scratchy records we had to listen to so we could correctly recite our Haftara portion. (The records were often swapped out, when no one was listening, for Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass's Whipped Cream, a record I played to death as a kid.) And I remember shopping for a new talit, the prayer shawl one wears at his Bar Mitzvah. But mostly, and somewhat embarrassingly, I remember our weekly commando missions into the kitchen of the synagogue to steal food left over from Friday night services.

(My Bar Mitzvah classmates were Michael Langer and Scott Poris. One week we broke into the bottle of grape drink reserved for the kids. Being twelve at the time, we dutifully ignored the words CONCENTRATE on the front of the jug, and, more importantly, the admonition to "mix one capful to one gallon of water." If you've ever wondered what oil tastes like, I can fill you in.)

I was not a very serious candidate in 1975 and, truthfully speaking, I'm not a very religious Jew in 2006. But after watching Oliver and Amanda and Samantha and Jack perform so masterfully, I have hope for a younger, better generation.


Matt



p.s. Yes, that's me in this photo from my buddy David Fischer's Bar Mitzvah. We were fashion trendsetters, no? By the way, if you guessed anyone but the top left, I'm going to bop you on the head.