Photo of the Week #325

November 25, 2024 
Gay Block’s early photographic work in the 1970s documented the Jewish community she was surrounded by growing up in Houston, Texas and she expanded this work from 1982-85 when she began photographing the retired Jewish community in Miami’s South Beach, a project she remembers fondly:

“I loved their simple lives and their Yiddish accents. Living on their social security checks in one-room apartments in the small hotels, they walked to do their shopping, and came back to sit on the porch with friends. In the afternoon many took a light chair to the beach where they sat in circles singing old Yiddish songs, played cards or dominoes, or just visited. There were both Holocaust survivors and American born, but they all had the Yiddish accent and decried how their children’s Yiddish had been lost. I was drawn to return again and again over the next four years, until gentrification began making South Beach the hip place for young people that it soon became. 

This picture from the series is one of my favorites. I was photographing in South Beach, and as I was walking from one building to another—that’s where all those great deco hotels were built in the 50s—I saw these three guys talking like this and I took a snapshot. After I got this shot I asked them to look at me for another but this one, taken before they knew I was photographing them, became my favorite. The lesson here is to just keep photographing—don’t stop!”