Abraham Menashe is a photographer, poet, and lay theologian. He is the author of 14 photography books, and is committed to images that affirm life, provide refuge and offer consolation.
Menashe’s photographs are featured worldwide, including Newsweek, Scientific American, The New York Times, and Time-Life Books. His distinct trademark brand of Humanistic Photography, explores humanity from a spiritual perspective; he looks at a sad, and confused world and sees it as holy. He creates iconic images, internationally acclaimed for their poetic beauty and compassion: “My life and work are a pilgrimage. I am awash with blessings, endlessly chasing the sublime.”
Menashe’s books include Inner Grace (Knopf, 1979), whose subject is America’s multi-handicapped population, awarded the 1980 One to One Media Award, and published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Witkin Gallery and featured on CBS’s Sunday Morning television; The Face of Prayer (Knopf, 1980), images made around the world—made possible by Fellowship in Prayer‘s first annual Carl Ellison Evans Award, published with a companion exhibit at the International Center of Photography, New York, also featured on CBS’s Sunday Morning, hosted by Charles Kuralt.
Menashe’s photographs are in the archives of numerous museum collections, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society, the Jewish Museum, New York, the Kosciuszko Foundation, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Commissioned work includes a permanent installation at the Church Center of the United Nations, New York.
Abraham was born in 1951 in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, Egypt. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Jews were expelled from Arab countries, and in 1961, his widowed mother emigrated with three children to Princeton, New Jersey. Abraham, a self-taught photographer, now lives in New York. He married storyteller and translator Dvorah Friedgood (m 1974 – div. 1988), which produced a daughter, Rebecca Menashe, artist, born 1979.
Abraham Menashe is a conscientious objector who worked with the Religious Society of Friends during the Vietnam War on behalf of the peace movement. He is a student of Attitudinal Healing—the practice of letting go of fear and letting in nonjudgemental attitudes; also an advocate of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication.
When the digital marketplace replaced traditional print sales, Menashe turned to poetry. He finds solace, in predawn hours, looking out his balcony as ferries seamlessly glide across Manhattan’s east river. A plant whisperer and avid aquarist, Abraham can be found strolling through nurseries as well as nurturing his ever-evolving plant collection.
