Kibbutz Days

Photographs from Kibbutz Kfar Menachem (1980-6) and a personal text by the author.

After several exhibits of my photographs of life on Kibbutz Kfar Menachem and the curatorial selections made from thousands of images available, I decided to create a book on the subject. One decision was to make it big with double spreads measuring 40X62 cm. The major question regarded the text to be included. The decision to write the text myself led to an 18 month period where I interviewed about 30 people that I knew from the kibbutz, went to Yad Vashem to view testimonies of others who had survived the Holocaust, requested that my wife Gila write some poems to accompany certain photos, and sat in the National Library in Jerusalem to write a story about my experiences surrounding this period of my life. The text would include a short theoretical description of what kibbutz life was like, but it would be a story of where I fit in. There were many considerations involved in telling about this 11 year period of my life, how I got to live on a kibbutz and how I left. The writing led to some basic understandings of how important kibbutz living was for me. Deciding what was relevant to this story and what could be excluded led me to interesting personal insights.
-- Joel Kantor