Photography Is Preservation

This illustrated lecture features Marisa Scheinfeld’s photographs of abandoned sites where over 500 hotels once prospered in New York’s Catskill Mountains. In her talk, Scheinfeld will discuss the rise and fall of the Borscht Belt, her documentation of the famed region, and the founding of the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project.

Marisa Scheinfeld is a Jewish-American photographer and author who was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1980 and raised in the Catskills. She received her B.A. from the State University at Albany in 2002, and her MFA from San Diego State University in 2011. Her work is motivated an interest in regional landscape and its myriad histories, both apparent and hidden, and a drive to use the medium of photography as an act of preservation. 

Marisa's work is among the collections of the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, The Center for Jewish History, The National Yiddish Book Center, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley and the Museum of Photographic Arts. Her work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes, Paper Magazine, Village Voice, the American Historical Association and American Photography. 

In the fall of 2016, Cornell University Press released her first book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland. Marisa is currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at SUNY Purchase and working on her second book which explores hidden, alternative and fringe histories of the Catskills and Hudson Valley.