Enquête d’Identité: Patrick Zachmann’s Quest for Identity

This series retraces Patrick Zachmann’s personal quest for identity. Both of his parents were Jewish immigrants in France — his mother from a Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria and his father from Poland — and yet they never spoke of their background, apart from traces of traumatic narratives, including that his grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. “There was no coherent, streamline story, no thread to the past,” he said in an interview at Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. It was only as a photographer that he began exploring and documenting Jewish people and culture. Zachmann gradually discovered a world to which he belonged, yet knew very little about.

The resulting book, Enquête d’Identité, features black-and-white photographs of Jewish communities, ceremonies and rituals, often accompanied with Zachmann’s own text that reveal the complex nature of the relationship to his Jewish background.