With every click of the shutter, Lloyd Wolf captures musicians maintaining a Jewish tradition that nearly died out in the wake of the Holocaust. He could be the first to do so — Wolf’s exhibition is the only known photographic archive of the klezmer world.
The Arlington-based photographer has spent the past three decades documenting klezmer music, an Eastern European Jewish instrumental folk genre. His photos now adorn the walls of Fairfax’s Pozez Jewish Community Center in an exhibition titled “A Joyful Noise.”
“I photographed some of the original purveyors of the music,” Wolf told Washington Jewish Week.
Wolf’s photo collection is cemented in a titular book that was published in 2025 by the Klezmer Institute. True to the name, the 45 photos in “A Joyful Noise” depict musicians with their eyes closed in passion or their mouths wide open mid-song.
“I was trying to make an invisible art form visible,” Wolf explained. “You can’t see music, so how do you convey that energy?”
The answer lies within the subjects’ facial expressions and body language and through “dynamic lighting.”
One of Wolf’s favorites of the bunch is a photo of Frank London of The Klezmatics performing, in which only the trumpeter’s eye is in sharp focus. Sometimes, Wolf will also use photo editing techniques for enhanced visual effects.
Klezmer remains an “extremely niche” genre that isn’t widely known outside of a small, passionate Jewish community.
“The music had almost died out because, after the founding of Israel and after World War II, taste shifted from the music that had come over from Europe, … and [klezmer] music stopped being so popular,” Wolf said.
Many American Jews instead listened to traditional Israeli songs, he said.
Wolf himself didn’t grow up consciously listening to klezmer music — his German father preferred Mozart. But Wolf sometimes heard the genre. “My mother’s parents were from a little village in Eastern Europe, and they had Yiddish radio on when I would go visit,” he recalled.
His decades-long archival project began with a work assignment from B’nai B’rith International Jewish Monthly of Washington. Jeff Rubin, Wolf’s editor at the magazine, sent him to New York to cover the klezmer revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“Here’s a couple bands in New York. Go up and photograph them,” Rubin had told him.
The bands included Kapelye — one of only a few klezmer bands performing in the United States at the time — and The Klezmatics — which still exist today in New York City. Wolf photographed the band rehearsals using a film camera.
“I liked it, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the music. I was paying attention to the pictures,” he said.
The turning point came at a club in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Wolf and Frank London, one of the founders of The Klezmatics, “really hit it off” over a meal. “And then they played, and they were just astonishing,” Wolf said. “They weren’t Grammy winners yet — they were kids.”
He kept photographing The Klezmatics a few more times and photographed some other klezmer bands. “I got more interested in the music, and over time, I started collecting a bunch of this stuff,” said Wolf, referring to photos of klezmer artists.
Having already published two books on Jewish subjects, Wolf tried to pitch his photo collection to his agent to no avail.
“It turned out that was a good thing because I had another bunch of years to continue photographing,” he said. “I started going to a lot of shows, and the pictures were fun.”
Wolf became the “go-to guy” for many musicians when they needed a photographer. He also served as an artist-in-residence, teaching a class in Canada, and created album cover art for bands. He has photographed hundreds of bands and individual performers, ranging from the internationally recognized to small community ensembles.
“[I] then realized at some point that I had a body of work that was large enough and interesting,” Wolf said. “It turned out there was no one else doing it. There’s a lot of people that photograph the blues or rap or bluegrass — all these different music genres — … and I realized this is something the community didn’t have.”
Drawing inspiration from jazz photographs of the 1950s and 1960s, Wolf describes his photos as “historic.”
“I’d photographed some of the people from my parents’ generation,” he said. “I’ve been doing it since ‘92, and so this captures a period of change in time.”
Such historical documentation is important given that many original listeners of klezmer are no longer living. “A couple of older people are still alive, but very, very few,” Wolf said.
“This is the music that our grandparents danced to, mourned to, got married to, partied to, and it is related, in many ways, to the music that is in the synagogue traditionally,” he said.
Even though the sound dates back centuries, the tunes aren’t far from Hasidic niggunim, or wordless melodies, Wolf said: “When people hear it, it sounds familiar, even if they don’t even know it. It just grabs.”
“I just like klezmer music. A lot. And I trust the pictures convey some sense of what I find so compelling about it,” Wolf told Sarah Berry, the curator of Bodzin Art Gallery.
“A Joyful Noise” is on view at the Bodzin Art Gallery of the Pozez Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia, 8900 Little River Turnpike, Fairfax. The Pozez JCC will host a closing reception and klezmer performance on Jan. 24 from 7 to 9 p.m. For more information, visit thej.org/event/a-joyful-noise or call 703-323-0880.
