The Bill Aron Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society showcases the photographer’s career-defining images of 20th-century Jewish life alongside an expansive yet rarely seen personal archive. A combination of photographic materials and personal papers, the collection boasts over 3,000 photographic prints, 4,400 rolls of film, and 100s of extensively annotated contact sheets. Supplementary materials include a selection of personal writings, lectures, exhibition texts, and publications.
In 1974, informed by a background in sociology and his own Jewish upbringing, Bill Aron joined a legacy of street photographers inspired by the cultural tapestry of New York’s Lower East Side. His images of street vendors, shopkeepers, scribes, and neighborhood residents capture an ever-evolving community during a period of rapid cultural change.
Aron first garnered international acclaim with the 1986 publication of From the Corners of the Earth: Contemporary Photos of the Jewish World. Through a compilation of location-based visual essays spanning 12 years, Aron documents the disparate Jewish communities of Cuba, Israel, Los Angeles, New York, and the former Soviet Union.
In his second publication, Shalom Y’All: Images of Jewish Life in the American South, Aron contributes his photographs to a multidisciplinary portrait of the oft-overlooked southern Jewish communities. Macy B. Heart of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience (MSJE) first approached Aron in the early 1990s with his proposal for a visual survey of the region and its residents. Accompanied by project director and collaborator Vicky Rikes Fox, who would author the text, the series would take Aron over a decade to complete. The resulting images serve as a time capsule for the historically underrepresented and, in many cases, vanishing Jewish communities.
In the early 2000’s, Aron shifted his focus to portraiture with Holocaust Survivors: The Indestructible Spirit. Commissioned by the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University with the 1939 Society, the full-color portraits offer a lesser-explored side of the Holocaust survivor narrative. Following closely, and along the same theme, is a deeply personal series titled New Beginnings: The Triumphs of 120 Cancer Survivors.
Bill Aron took thousands of photographs between 1974 and 2011, often revisiting spaces that first inspired him while working in black-and-white film, and harnessing newer technologies to capture the same views in digital panoramas. Aron’s work is almost exclusively project-based; the final product is always a meticulously curated selection for print or exhibition. As a result, only a very small percentage of those images ever reach the public eye.
Now permanently housed within an active archival repository, The Bill Aron Collection offers a unique opportunity to contextualize and re-examine these works as pieces of the historical record. For every exposure that made it to print, hundreds of additional images will now be made available through our online digital collections portal.
