Gay Block began her career as a portrait photographer in 1973 with portraits of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston, Texas. The ever-widening expanse of her projects followed both family lines, in Camp Girls, and the Jewish community, in South Miami Beach. Her approach to portraiture is motivated by the desire to move beyond superficial representation, often making extensive audio and film recordings of conversations with her subjects. Block is as fascinated by exactly the way people tell their life stories as she is with exactly what they look like when she arrives to photograph them.
Block’s multiple-award-winning short film about her mother, Bertha Alyce, has been shown in over 25 film festivals and is included with her book Bertha Alyce: Mother exPosed. Her landmark work with writer Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, both a book (Radius Books) and traveling exhibition, has been seen in over 50 venues in the U.S. and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 1992.
Gay Block’s photographs are included in many museums and private collections throughout the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum (Manhattan), the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.
