Intermarried

Yael Ben-Zion is a New York-based photographer who grew up in Israel; her husband is French, and they live in Washington Heights, Manhattan.  Her latest monograph, Intermarried (Kehrer, 2014), features photographs of mixed heritage families from Washington Heights.

In an interview with The New York Times (1/11/2014), Ben-Zion describes how she identified mixed families for the book:

"I wasn’t going to go in the street and ask couples if they were mixed. I didn’t grow up here; I didn’t even know what terminology to use. But I live in a very diverse Manhattan community that has an online parent list with more than 2,000 families on it. I put up an ad saying I was looking for couples that define themselves as mixed. I said it could be different religion, ethnicity or social background. I didn’t use the word race, because I wasn’t sure how politically correct that was. All the couples who responded are either interfaith or interracial or both, but my goal from the beginning wasn’t to create some statistical visual document. For example, I have hardly any Asian people, and I don’t think there are any Muslims, and the reason is that they didn’t approach me."

Read the full interview here.