YURI MARDER

The Exile Project is a series of portraits of people who live in one language but have their hearts in another. It is a project about language and identity which examines the difficulties we all face trying to communicate through language and across cultural borders. The subjects photographed in this series are, for a variety of reasons, existing in a language other than that of their birth. Each subject is asked to consider the basic question, what happens to the mother tongue when it exists, separated or unused, in a state of cultural isolation?
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150 Years is a conversation across a chasm of time. Diptychs pair daguerreotypes from the 1850's with present-day portraits—faces juxtaposed beyond the reach of any single human lifetime. 150 Years is also a conversation between a contemporary photographer and those who made photographic images at a time when photography was new and magical.
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From the 1920’s through the 1940’s, bits and pieces of my family sailed into New York harbor escaping persecution and war in Europe, passing through a bewildering bureaucratic maze called Ellis Island. There were so many torments there, so many injustices and forgotten tragedies. Yet their successful passage through turned Ellis Island into a hopeful metaphor for my family, as it did for many millions of other new Americans.
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