An Israeli’s Album

In 1982 I returned to Israel from London. I didn’t want to come back. I started wandering, not with the intention of making a book, but to reacquaint myself with home. I would go on treks, sleep outside alone in the field. Photographs kept accumulating, and already in 1984 I had the opportunity to show some of them in the Journey exhibition at the Camera Obscura gallery. After that, I collected the photographs into a “dummy” which was constructed in the format of postcards with a short line of text containing only the place name. I made it as a tribute to albums from the end of the 19th century intended for those who couldn’t make the journey here or for tourists who needed a souvenir to take home. I used Kodak postcard photo paper, and pasted black and white photos in an old postcard album, with the short text in pencil. The first dummy, is bound in a hard black cover, 22.5x16 cm, the second is bound in a green cover, size 27x21 cm. I worked on the book with Doron Dekel, who in 1988 was a fourth-year graphic design student at Bezalel. The first edition was published by Camera Obscura.
In 2015, I was invited to participate in the exhibition Drive-in at the Ashdod Museum, which was a tribute to photographers of the 1980s, curated by Yuval Biton and Roni Cohen-Binyamini. I was asked to present Israeli Album again in a similar way to the Journey exhibition. The museum financed the scans of the negatives, so I could dedicate myself to the production of a second edition of the book. I decided to add five color images, and six new texts. I published the second edition in my publishing house, Meir – Publishing House, Abirim.