Brief History

There are good reasons why photographers used to be called “sun artists” or “soul trappers”, and later “camera poets”, “dream catchers” or “photographic artists”. Photographic studios were given names along the same lines like “Pri’or” (Light Fruit) or “Keren Or” (Light Ray), and photographers also adopted names including the Hebrew words for “light” or “lamp” such as “Benor”, “Oron”, or “Nerani”. The photographs appearing on this website seem to have captured waves of light and breaths of wind through the camera lenses – the spirit of the place, the people and the time.

The Israel Photography House is first and foremost a photographers website. The names of about 500 men and women appear on the site. For half of them, most of whom are deceased, this is their first exposure within the local visual and cultural domain. The entries devoted to these photographers and their photographs include accompanying text that provides an introduction to their personalities. The 170 years covered by the site (1855–2024) are presented here not only in terms of the historical events they contained but as a chronological-creative mapping of the appearance of the photographers: Armenians, Jews and Arabs in the region of Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The pictures displayed here bear the unique personal seal of each photographer in the period during which he or she worked. One must remember that these photographers – the “angels of photographic history” – are intermediaries between us, who live here, and local visual history, both national and personal.

The history of local photography covers the same years as world photography (beginning in 1839). It all started with around 300 foreign photographers who came as tourists to bring home photographic testimony of the holy sites, but as early as 1855 local photography had begun to become established, at first by converted Jews and members of the Armenian community and later, by the time of the First Aliyah in 1890, by Jewish and Arab photographers as well. There is evidence of professional connections between local photographers working early in the 20^th century, including work in shared studios and exchange of professional information and assistants.

Local photography developed in parallel to its global development, with technical and visual links to parallel Western artistic trends throughout the years. However, due to the lack of accompanying cultural and documentary institutions in a country struggling for survival, the preservation, research, and teaching of the history of local photography and the publication of local photographers’ work have been doomed to neglect, and hence to oblivion.

During the successive waves of Aliyah (1904, 1933, 1948) photographers arrived in Israel who had studied the discipline of photography in their countries of origin and began to utilize their professional skills in this country. At the time of the establishment of the state (1948) there was a predominance of many self-taught photographers and assistants. They had picked up their technique orally from older professionals and from professional literature since, despite brief attempts to set up photography departments at the old Bezalel (1910) and the new (1942), creative photography was not taught anywhere until the early 1970s. Nevertheless, in spite of the harsh conditions and the lack of materials and proper storage for conservation, there were photographers, some working with funding from the PR departments of the Zionist funds – the Jewish National Fund (1901) and the United Israel Appeal (1920) – who were able to leave behind a sizable and impressive body of work, in terms of both quantity and quality. This work is on a level comparable to that created in the Western world, and it comprises not only the forgotten history of local photography but also the history of the development of local settlement. The full exposure of these collections can better illuminate what was happening here from the last years of the 19^th century up to the 1970s.

Hundreds of thousands of negatives, some on glass, are still shrouded in oblivion in anonymous cellars waiting for deliverance. Many collections are in a poor state of preservation and some have even vanished over the years. After the establishment of the state (1948) most of the activity of the Zionist catalogue was transferred from the archives of the funds to the archives of the GPO (Government Press Office) which maintained involvement only with photographs and photographers connected to national events and leaders. Archives of other institutions, organizations and newspaper offices were set up alongside the GPO. In spite of the development of photography schools and departments in the late 1970s, the development of newspaper and magazine photography alongside the Ein Hod photography Biennale in the late 1980s and the “flourishing of photography” in the late 1990s, today only the country’s three largest museums have photographic collections. In consequence, there are relatively few exhibitions of historical local photography, publication of catalogues, and research and professional teaching of the history of local photography in art and photography schools and university art departments. This is the case even though the photographic medium is accessible and comprehensible to many viewers and the status of the art of photography is comparable to other plastic arts. The shortage cuts both ways, affecting the past, present and future alike. The exposure of the history of local photography can become a broad scholarly, historical and cultural platform for photographers and curators in the present and the future.

Most photographers and art historians date the beginning of local photography to the late 1970s but in fact, as described above, local photography began as early as the 1850s. During the last 50 years individuals have attempted to uncover this lost history, and the roots of this website stem from their valuable activity. One may say that if photographers are a kind of “community of memory”, today most archives are a “community of oblivion”.

This important photographic material has no real physical home. There are many collections in various archives, some of which have been digitized, but this is the first time that an official and central body in Israel – the Photography House – has researched and displayed the heritage of local photography.

This website includes a traditional archival core, an assemblage of historical works that forms a basis for future research. I hope that the concentration of data and the initial attempt to map the data on the site will enable ongoing discovery, exposure and criticism, as well as theoretical writing and different organizational systems. The website is positioned alongside the archival websites of the Israel Film Archive – Jerusalem Cinematheque, and the Kan Israel Broadcasting Authority Archives.

Tel Or – An Introduction to the History of Local Photography

The story of the development of local photography in the region of Mandatory Palestine and Israel is one of the most fascinating stories of the development of the medium in a single area. The region, on the shores of the Mediterranean and the threshold of the Middle East – the country of the stories of the Bible and the New Testament, with a wealth of sites sacred to three religions – brought photographers here as soon as photography was invented in 1839. The most natural place for photography as an art of controlling light seems to be the Holy Land, filled by a raw, harsh light and loaded with religious and political baggage. The 180 years of the development of photography were also years of great change in the region, in parallel to the development of modernism in the Western world. Photography of sacred locations and archaeological sites, and the eventual building of Jewish settlements alongside the Arab population, and displacing it, are among the signposts of the whole period. It is a story of the development of photographic approaches in the light of changing historical and cultural context, and of course in the light of the changes within the medium itself.

So the story of local photography begins in the mid-19^th century. After the invention of photography and the discovery of the possibilities it contains, there was a growing interest in the medium among intellectuals in the exotic Orient and its core – the Holy Land. Many pilgrims, tourists and research delegations visited the country, each with its own agenda. In parallel Western photography studios opened in the region’s central cities such as Beirut (the French Bonfils), Jerusalem (the American Colony), and Port Said (the Greek Zangaki). Like every area of life and culture in Israel one can point to a historical continuum in the development of local photography, some of whose chapters extensively overlap those of Zionism and the history of the Jewish settlement, from the First Zionist Congress in 1897 up to the present day. One might say that in parallel to the pioneers who settled the country, the pioneers of Jewish photography were at work in Israel. As a matter of fact, the pioneers of photography documented their comrades – examples of the “New Jew”. The photographic medium and its representative photographers also acted as evangelists of social and cultural concepts, giving a visual image to the national ethos of the future state. Their most important photographs became icons. Their activity can be traced from 1920, via the establishment of the state in 1948, the nature albums of the 1950s and photo annuals of the 1960s, through to the victory albums of the Six Day War in 1967.

The craft of photography has continued to make progress following the development of culture and technology in the modern period and the new definitions of independent photography in the early 1970s; the perception of photography as an artistic medium in the 1980s; up until the post-modernist questions that wound up the 20^th century and jump-started the 21^st century with the appearance of digital photography. In parallel there were Palestinian and Armenian photographers working in Israel, who documented the dramatic events that occurred from their own perspectives, though they lacked any established organization like the Zionist funds, and in some cases expressed a different perspective on the realization of the Zionist vision in Israel – Palestinian photographic memory.

Local photography in the timeframe in question, focusing on Jewish photographers, can be divided into eight periods: 1855–1891: “The Aura of the Holy Land” / 1891–1906: “The Turn of the Century” / 1906–1933: “Grand Visions and Building the Country” / 1933–1948: “Modernism and Zionist Engagement” / 1948–1973: “The rise of the Nation and "The poem of a daying lake"  / 1973–1991: “Personal Expression in Art and the Media” / 1991–2000: “The Serial Look” period / 2000–2020: “The Glories of Digitization”, leading up to AI.

The work of the pioneers of photography in Israel deserves to be highly valued, since these photographers not only left us the photographic history of the region and the family, but worked as immigrants in onerous conditions in a country which was dry, hot, embattled, weighed down with social, political, military and economic problems, with insufficient appreciation of their work either within society or within the field of local art. And still, throughout this turbulent period, they tried to express their ideas and their perspective on the country. One also needs to take into account the conservative religious society which influenced the secular establishment (and continues to do so until today) in everything connected to budgeting for culture and art which are not relevant to Torah study, and what is worse infringe the biblical principle of “Thou shalt not make for yourself any graven image or any likeness…” (Exodus 20, 4) – in other words, thou shalt not rival God’s work of creation, thou shalt not create, thou shalt not make!

Unlike painting and sculpture, photography in Israel has a history as old as the history of photography in the Western world, which is not affected by distancing from Western tradition. What is more, some of the photographers working in Israel, such as Lerski, Auerbach and Raviv, were adopted in some of the countries of the Western world due to their importance in the history of photography and culture. If we succeed in building a more continuous infrastructure and light up the dark basements in a controlled manner, we will be able to base the study of the history of photography and art on fascinating local material which is waiting to be researched and discovered.

However, even if many of the early local photographers had artistic pretensions, it was not expressed to the same degree as today: this is a question of context and locale. However they certainly had documentary pretensions with the awareness that they were photographing history, and aesthetic pretensions stemming from the perception that they were creating art. One must remember that most artists were people of culture with higher education and some of them, especially those active in the early 20^th century, had studied in art schools and academies in Europe.

If we divide the 20^th century into two, we can identify a progression from documentary, romantic, objective and propaganda photography during the first two thirds of the century, towards subjective, artistic and socially active photography in its last third. Both contributed not only to photography and art but also to the creation and formulation of local culture as a whole.

This introduction is in fact an invitation to a journey: a journey in the footsteps of lost time, lost collections, anonymous and forgotten photographers through the territory of the Holy Land, the Crazy Land and the Freaky Land. This is the essence of the path I have been traveling for the last 30 years, a path of excavations and rescue, which contemporary digitization can make accessible to the general public. What appears on this website is only the thin upper layer of what one may call the history of local photography. This website is the repayment of a moral debt to the community of photographers, professionals, dreamers, intellectuals, carrying complex and heavy device and capturing with single presses on the shutter releases of their cameras the light reflected from this country and the people who founded it and constructed it, fought for it, preserved it, and lived in it; in their photographs they captured its spirit – the spirit of place, people and time. In the photographs appearing on this website many people can be seen “gazing” at us, the viewers, as we gaze back at them. Furthermore, by reversing one’s angle of vision one can physically locate where each photographer was standing when they took their photographs. The importance of this website is in the exposure of these images and the territories and figures they contain, like freeing souls and spirits from the past to us, the people of the present.

I will conclude this introduction with a quotation from the photographer in Natan Alterman’s play “Kinneret, Kinneret” (1962). The photographer is posing a group of pioneers in their twenties for a group photograph and says to them, “Now let’s rest. Soon the sun will rise. We will prepare to catch it at the moment it rises. Its light is already flickering behind the hill and you are already standing in the light.” This is the “Blazing Blue Light” that accompanied photographers in this country, the light breaking out from the archaeological site of local photography. The photographs captured from this light on glass negatives, films and photographic paper, and in our generation by the sensors of digital cameras, and displayed on this web site, are a kind of refinement, a pause, a rest, and an anticipation – like the moment before awakening.

Guy Raz, 2024