The Last Photograph

The Last Photograph is a first-of-its-kind exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in which a documentary film is disassembled and re-edited into a multi-channel video installation where viewers can move around freely. The art exhibition as a curatorial form meets the cinematic medium, with the museum offering itself as an experimental platform for a new creative collaboration. In this instance, artist Micha Bar-Am, the father of Israeli photojournalism, opened his archive comprising fifty years of activity for award-winning filmmaker Ran Tal, and the intergenerational encounter spawned a documentary film made up entirely of still photographs that appear consecutively to the sounds of Tal’s poignant conversations with Micha and Orna Bar-Am. Tal’s documentary film looks at Bar-Am’s pioneering act and at the crisis of consciousness that is building in it. The curatorial act considers Tal’s documentary action as a form of expression that exceeds the parameters of the conventional movie theatre.