Bruce Katsiff’s parents were Jewish immigrants, so, like many immigrant parents, they cared deeply about education. They wanted all three of their sons to go to college and work toward a practical career path.
Katsiff began his own college experience as a pre-law student, but he dropped out to study photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His parents weren’t thrilled about it, but the son was committed to the path that had gripped him since the popularization of single-lens reflex technology, which allowed the photographer to see through the lens what would be captured on film, in the early 1960s.
It also turned out to be a pretty practical path.
Katsiff went on to have a photo featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City while still a college student. That got him gigs at museums around the country. It also led to a teaching and administrative career at Bucks County Community College and the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown.
The photographer helped found the latter, and from now through Aug. 2, it is honoring his life’s work with a retrospective exhibition, “Pieces of a Life.”
The exhibition includes photographs from all of Katsiff’s collections over his six decades as an artist. Those include River Town Portraits, of the friends he made after he moved out of Philadelphia to Lumberville, on the Delaware River, in the 1970s, and Nature Morte, his collection of shots of posed animal remains.
Those started when Katsiff found a dying raccoon that had been hit by a car in his Lumberville garden one day. It formed the basis of an artistic philosophy he still holds.
“I’m not trying to make pretty pictures of sunsets or pretty pictures by the ocean,” Katsiff explained. “I spend a lot of time looking at subject matter we’re supposed to turn away from, and seeing if we can find beauty in it.”
Katsiff’s philosophy will be on display in 60 photographs curated by art historian Dorothy Fisher.
“Bruce Katsiff had a monumental impact on the Michener Art Museum as an institution, and we are delighted to welcome him back as a contemporary artist,” said Executive Director and CEO Anne Corso in a press release. “I hope this exhibition gives our visitors a fuller picture of the remarkable man who built such a legacy for the artistic community of Bucks County and beyond.”
Katsiff’s pictures are held in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. But over the course of his career, he has also built institutions.
He helped launch the art department at Bucks County Community College, his first job out of school.
“The community college movement was starting in America. There was a missionary zeal. We were helping kids try out college,” he recalled.
At 27, he was elected chair of the department, and he grew to enjoy administrative work. He said he brought six Guggenheim fellows to teach at Bucks, and at one time, Princeton University and Yale University raided the community college’s faculty.
In 1989, he took over as founding director of the Michener Art Museum, a project he helped launch with a 1970s research paper for the Philadelphia Arts Council on the possibility of a regional museum. In the late 1980s, arts council members started asking him if he could make it happen.
Together, those members and Katsiff got Bucks County commissioners to donate the property that was once a Quaker prison. One of the commissioners knew the famous author James A. Michener, who lived in Doylestown. Michener agreed to lend his name to the project if the organizers could prove it had community support.
They did, and he ended up writing checks, too, according to Katsiff.
“It was Michener’s good name that helped to galvanize a lot of support for the institution,” he said.
Katsiff has made a career out of his passion. He said he never would have believed it himself if it weren’t for great Jews in the arts like composer Leonard Bernstein. The artist describes himself as more of a cultural Jew.
“The Jews are smart people, and they accomplish a lot. Look at that incredible influence they’ve had on American culture,” he said. “Those traditions helped me say, ‘This might be a path I can take, too.’”
Katsiff has helped make it possible for other young Jews and artists in general to take a similar path. But he also fears for the future of his art form. As he explained, “99.9% of photos that are made never exist as physical objects” today.
“They exist as fleeting images on a computer screen, or on an iPhone screen,” he said.
“And there’s an even more profound change happening. Up until now, if we saw a photograph, we generally believed that it was true,” he continued. “Photographs that are created by AI have no relationship to reality. What now happens is we’re going to assume that it’s a fake until we believe that it’s true.”
“I don’t think we can do anything other than understand it,” he concluded.