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Boris Bennett was born as Boris Sochaczewska in
Ozokoff, Poland, in 1900. One of eight children his
father had a small cloth factory. At 18 Boris moved to
Paris and started work in a photographic studio before
being taken on by a German photographic materials
company who sent him to London in 1922 as a sales
representative. Boris (right) stayed in London and
by 1927 he had changed his tongue-twisting name
to Boris Bennett and he had opened his first
photographic studio at 150 Whitechapel Road.
The East End in the 1920s still contained a large
Jewish community and the streets of Whitechapel
were busy with Jewish delis and bagel shops serving
a thriving Jewish rag trade. Times were hard but just
like their indigenous neighbours the young Jewish
people of the East End loved the cinema and the
glamour of Hollywood. Boris Bennett became
the
Jewish wedding photographer by offering couples
the glamour of Hollywood on a shoestring budget.
Instead of the staid old fashioned backdrops used by
other studio photographers at that time Boris designed
modern wooden sets with a variety of Hollywood
inspired set ups with steps, fireplaces, pillars and
window and he used movie style lighting and
meticulous post-production to create stylish and
elegant photographs. The window backdrop used
for the beautiful 1936 wedding photograph of Cecilia
Cohen and Abraham Rosenblatt to the top right was
an especially popular choice. Clever chap eh?
Sunday was wedding day in the Jewish East End and
by incredibly efficient organisation Boris managed
up to sixty weddings a day. The couple would marry
at one of the sixty-five local synagogues and visit the
photographic studio before the reception or wedding
meal. Large crowds would gather outside Boris’s
studio for the weekly spectacle of up the wedding
parties arriving in all their finery. Dressmakers would
set up camp to sketch the brides as they arrived.
Bottom right are Belle da Costa and
Tubby
Lolosky
who married at the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place
on 8 May 1930. Have you noticed with family
wedding photographs how there’s often one side
very smiley and one not so?
A successful man Boris opened studios in the
West End, first on Oxford Street and later Bond
Street, Marble Arch, Leicester Square and The
Strand. In all Boris Bennett took more than 150,000
wedding photographs before he died, aged 85,
in 1985. His studio camera, the Kodak Big Bertha
pictured right, was donated to the Jewish Museum
and the exhibition called
For Richer For Poorer:
Weddings Unveiled
is open now and runs at the
Jewish Museum until the end of May 2015.
The exhibition features evocative examples of Boris
Bennett wedding photographs alongside wedding
dresses, invitations and menus from 1880s to the
1950s. The wedding exhibition forms part of the visit
to the Jewish Museum in the afternoon on the City &
Village Tours Jewish London tour which is described
on page 40 of our 2015 brochure and can be read
In the morning we tell the story of the Jewish
presence in London and visit London’s oldest
For Richer For Poorer: Jewish Weddings Unveiled
