Black-and-White Frames, a Klezmer World Steeped in Color

The Forward runs a black-and-white photo feature on klezmer, arguing the tradition's color survives the grayscale — a claim the frames must prove.

By Daniel OkaforOctober 14, 20263 min read

Updated October 14, 2026

The Forward has published a photography feature on the klezmer world, and its headline makes the tension explicit: the photographs are black and white, but the klezmer scene they document, the paper argues, is "drenched with color."

That's the whole pitch in one line. A musical tradition born in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, carried through migration, near-erasure and revival, rendered in grayscale — and the argument that monochrome somehow intensifies, rather than flattens, the vibrancy of the culture on display.

What does black-and-white actually do here?

It's an old claim, and worth stress-testing. Strip the color from a wedding band, a clarinetist mid-phrase, a dance floor in full swing, and you remove the literal hue of the scene. What you gain is structure: gesture, expression, the grain of instruments and faces. Documentary photographers have leaned on this trade for a century, from the shtetl image-makers of the interwar years to the revival chroniclers of the 1970s and beyond.

The Forward's framing suggests the photographers involved understand the paradox. The pictures may show no color, yet the tradition — its modes, its humor, its grief and celebration tangled together — comes through saturated anyway. Whether the images earn that claim, the headline alone cannot prove. You'd want to look at the work.

Why klezmer keeps drawing cameras

Klezmer is a natural subject for the lens, and the reason is simple. It is music with a visible body: hands on strings and keys, lungs behind reeds, dancers who answer the melody physically. A photographer doesn't have to hunt for the picture. The music makes it.

There's also the historical weight. This is a repertoire that survived displacement, suppression and decades of neglect before its American and European revivals pulled it back onto stages. Every contemporary frame carries that backstory, whether the photographer gestures at it or not.

The Forward, founded in 1897 and long a chronicler of Jewish cultural life, has run photography of Jewish musical traditions before. This latest feature fits a familiar editorial pattern: find a living subculture, hand it to a photographer, let the images do the arguing.

The caveat that follows every promise

Here's what the headline doesn't tell you. We don't know, from the headline alone, which photographers shot the series, where the pictures were made, or whether they document American revivalists, European festival circuits, or both. A claim like "drenched with color" is doing a lot of persuasive work, and the proof lives in the frames themselves, not the caption.

It's also worth asking what monochrome risks. Klezmer today is a global, contested, sometimes commercialized scene. Grayscale can sanctify a subject — make it heritage, make it memory — when the living tradition is loud, argued over and very much in the present tense.

Where the tradition and the coverage go next

Klezmer keeps generating imagery because it keeps generating players, festivals and argument. The Forward's feature stands as one more document in a long visual record, and readers curious about the actual photographs will find them in the original piece — where the color, presumably, speaks for itself in shades of gray.

Key points

The Forward published a photography feature on the klezmer world
The images are black and white; the headline calls the klezmer scene "drenched with color"
The Forward was founded in 1897 as a chronicler of Jewish cultural life
The feature's headline does not name the photographers or shooting locations

Source: Google News: photography exhibition