Photographers explore their Bronx roots

The Bronx has not seen stickball, Yiddish newspapers or rows of laundry hanging out of apartments in years. These symbols of a bygone era, along with images of subsequent periods, starkly come back to life in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ latest show.

Dozens of black-and-white photos by Jules Aaron (1921-2008) provide an intimate glimpse of Jewish life in the borough in the 1960s. During the artist’s childhood along the Grand Concourse, Jewish people comprised the Bronx’s largest ethnic group. After leaving the neighborhood to pursue an eminent career in astrophysics, Mr. Aaron returned time and again to photograph his parents living on East 172nd and other mid-century sights in the neighborhood, according to a forthcoming essay by Marvin Heiferman.

“My Mother Hanging Laundry in the Yard: Bronx, NY” depicts the subject from the point of view that a child playing in the street might have had. Mr. Aaron uses an upward angle to show his mother in the middle of this humble chore, with sunny sheets on clotheslines lending a lively rhythm to the composition. One can imagine the woman ready to call her children to dinner in the next instant. Framing her at a height also gives a somewhat divine aura to Mr. Aaron’s mother.

Other photos by Mr. Aaron depict the Bronx’s thriving Jewish community. Families like the Aarons who moved out of cramped quarters on the Lower East Side came to view the Grand Concourse and its environs as “a ‘boulevard of dreams’ to New York Jews,” Mr. Heiferman notes. Mr. Aaron’s work shows how the idea played out, with candid black-and-white pictures of a girl pushing a boy on a tricycle, a group of women having a sidewalk chat and a man wearing a thoughtful frown and a derby hat underneath the L.

The other parts of “Three Photographers from the Bronx: Jules Aaron, Morton Broffman and Joe Conzo” include Mr. Broffman’s (1928-1992) photos from the civil rights era and Mr. Conzo’s (born in 1963) youthful shots of protests against the movie “Fort Apache, The Bronx.”