The World in Front of Me

In 1978 Bill and his wife Isa left New York City for Los Angeles, first living in Venice Beach before settling in the vibrant Jewish community of Pico Robertson. After raising a family and having a prolific career, Bill considers Los Angeles to be his home. Alongside his project-based photography, Bill also documented his daily Jewish life of raising two sons with Isa, as well as the lives of the...

Bill has traveled to Israel numerous times since his first visit as an undergraduate in 1961. In 1980, and again in 2010, he returned, no longer a student, but a professional photographer, seeking to capture everyday life in historic spaces. With each trip, Bill's stories provide a unique perspective of not only an individual growing and maturing, but also his experience witnessing a country age a...

In 1978 Bill traveled with a group to Cuba looking to document Jewish life there. The Jewish population, once robust and diverse, had shrunken to an estimated 1500 people under the rule of Fidel Castro. Cuba's official atheistic state had driven out or discouraged many people from taking part in a religious life. Upon reaching Havana, Bill discovered that while a handful of synagogues remained ope...

Bill lost both his parents at a young age; his father when he was 9 years old, and his mother when he was in high school. When Bill was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 50, a part of him felt that this was a foregone conclusion. In an effort to feel less isolated, Bill began to seek support and connect with others who were also battling cancer, and those who had gone into remission. What he enc...

In 2005, Bill Aron was approached by Marilyn Harran of Chapman University's Holocaust Studies department to photograph 100 members of the 1939 Society. The project of oral histories and portraits was named  The Indestructible Spirit . The 1939 Society was formed in Los Angeles in 1952 by fourteen survivors of the Holocaust. The support group evolved to become an organization dedicated to memoriali...

In the early 1990's Bill Aron was approached by Macy Hart and Vicki Reikes Fox of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience to document Jewish life in the American South. Never having spent much time in that area of the world, Bill figured that the project would be completed rather quickly, "South, deep South—how many Jews could there be? One or two trips, it'll be done." The project would last...

In 1981, Bill Aron went to the Soviet Union to photograph Jewish people living behind the Iron Curtain. Many of these Jews were refuseniks who had applied to leave the USSR but were denied, and as a consequence were subject to harassment, lost their jobs, and in some cases, were even imprisoned. Bill traveled to Moscow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and Minsk and photographed the Jewish life tha...

Bill Aron and his wife Isa moved to New York City in 1974, during the heyday of urban street photography. Looking for a career change, but with no clear idea on what he should do, Bill turned to his camera to fill his days. He began to document his Jewish world: the Lower East Side where he worked, and the Upper West Side Havurah Community, where he found fellowship and a radical method of Jewish...

From a young age, Bill Aron was drawn to photography, but never considered it as a career. Losing his father and mother in childhood, he was pulled by a desire to freeze time and capture moments, a power he discovered in photographs. After completing his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago, he found himself spending more time in darkrooms and behind a camera than doing any work related t...

In the summer of 2025, journalist and writer Ruth Andrew Ellenson sat down with famed photographer Bill Aron, and recorded more than 12 hours of interviews. For nearly 50 years, Bill traveled the world, photographing Jewish communities as near as his home of Los Angeles, and as far away as the Soviet Union. From the American South to Cuba, from New York to Jerusalem, Bill captured it all. This ser...