In Our Image

The first time I saw In Our Image, I couldn’t believe that a book like that was photographed in Israel. Yesterday I noticed that Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote the introduction. It struck me that I hadn’t remembered that. That’s a bit of a strange starting point for our conversation, but here we are. How did the connection with Leibowitz come about?

Actually, it’s interesting to start from there. His text is so clever. Over the years, whenever I come back to him, I’m amazed by how he said it all, gently, without being blunt. Meeting him made an important impact. In fact, that’s how the book came to be as it is. I got to him through my wife who was one of his students in the Philosophy Department. And around that time, Professor Asa Kasher also suggested that I meet him. He said, “There’s one person who can write an introduction to your book: Leibowitz.” My wife and I went to see him together. I remember his wife, Greta, making the most delicious tea I ever had. Maybe I was also very thirsty.

I came to him with a book in process. I had a corpus of about 100 photos I had chosen from an array of photos I had taken all across Israel over a period of six years. I decided I wanted a total of 50, and my editing was very “artistic.” I scattered violent images of police investigations and the occupation throughout the book. Leibowitz looked at my version and said, “I can’t write for a book like this.” He contended: “Where is the science, the technology, the buildings?” A contention he later included in the published text (“The author did not undertake to conduct a systematic visual survey of our reality and we do not intend to encompass …”). I told him I didn’t want to show or photograph everything. He disagreed with my initial edit. He sensed its potential but didn’t want to impose his thinking on my work. My wife understood what he meant, and said “Wait a minute, maybe you should change the order.” We left the meeting with a new mindset about the editing, which starts out with more general things that characterize Israel, and then in the middle of the book, the Judean Desert, the occupation, and the violence appear. 

The images related to the occupation are like a wound in the center of the book’s body. How did you edit the sequence?

I was sitting in my room in the kibbutz while the children were in the children’s dormitory. I laid out the pictures on the floor and started to put them in order. Looking back, I feel I did the best I could. 

How was the book received?

We’ll begin at the end. After the book was published, there was an exhibition at the Israel Museum curated by Nissan Peretz. Yaron London interviewed me. Since I didn’t agree to be interviewed live, the interview was recorded in the afternoon and broadcast in the evening. I sat at home and watched it, and during the broadcast, responses came in from the defense establishment and the commander of the security forces in the territories. They wanted to know who took the photographs, they wanted to see all the pictures. Now, I had taken the photographs partly in Gaza and partly in Tel Aviv. In fact, most of the tough images were taken in Tel Aviv, because they didn’t really let me into Gaza all that much. I was seriously uncertain about what to write in the image caption: police, security forces. Bear in mind that this was before the first intifada, before books were written about torture in interrogations. I went with friends who were reservists and took pictures, and they told me, “You can’t come with us at night.” I understood what was going on, and I also understood that it was off-limits for discussion.

When the exhibition was up there were many newspaper articles and television reports about it. And the strangest thing was that the negative reviews actually came from the left. Somehow the center and the right, each for its own reasons, accepted the exhibition. In the daily newspaper Al Hamishmar (which was associated with the left), they wrote that it was exaggerated, “that it’s not really like that.” One magazine asked me to reveal names, in order to launch an investigation, and at the same time compared my photographs to the images of Leni Riefenstahl.

They claimed I was talking about the beauty of violence. I said to myself, I’m not a journalist, I don’t have any backing. My job is to show what I saw. If I demand an investigation, they’ll say “tsk, tsk tsk” and wag their fingers at some soldiers like they do today. And then what? I wanted to show the connection between the occupation, the evacuation of Yamit, and the Lebanon War. The whole sequence. This isn’t a journalistic investigation, it’s a critique through art.

Staging an exhibition of documentary photography in a museum wasn’t really fashionable at the time, right?

Documentary photography wasn’t exactly at the center of things then. There were two curators, Micha Bar-Am at the Tel Aviv Museum and Nissan Peretz in Jerusalem. There were exhibitions of foreign photographers, but few Israeli documentary photographers. In parallel to my editing, I approached both of them, and Peretz responded with an offer of a solo exhibition. It was good timing. In terms of responses, I remember someone saying that these were staged shots and that even if they weren’t, it didn’t matter because they looked staged. There was conceptual chatter, which I had a hard time connecting to. I go out and photograph something, and they start debating whether it was real or not. I was pretty angry about that.

Because it felt like they actually weren’t addressing the issues you raised?

There are film negatives, and there’s no room for me to direct reality; this is also the case in all my other works. Anyone who claimed it was staged avoided responding to reality.

One could say it’s a kind of the DNA of “this place”: religions, territory, war, grief, nationalism. The book opens with “Mengele’s Twins” at Yad Vashem.  You’re intuitively and poetically sketching out the conflicts, the main fractures of this place. Without a solution. How does this reconcile with the activist impetus?

I’ll tell you what comes to mind. At the time, it was customary for Arabs to wait by the roadside to be picked up for work. And it was customary for Palestinians to lower their gaze if you looked at them in the street. That is, the suppression was “the way it should be.” And “the boss” would come to collect “the worker.” And the conditions were clear: say thanks that you have work. During that time, few saw the reality underlying the silence inside the Green Line.

I would walk around Tel Aviv at three o’clock in the morning and the roads are empty, and there are tens of thousands of Arabs from Gaza working inside Israel, and I feel safer than I do in Montreal. And you don’t ask yourself how is this possible? What, isn’t anyone upset? Then I discovered the “Section,” a police unit that would look for Arabs in the streets and do to them what is seen in the photos. As journalists said when we marked the 30th anniversary of the intifada: “We didn’t know there was such violence” before the intifada. That’s a lie; it was just a lie. When you go home after you have taken part in an overnight activity on reserve duty, you don’t talk about what you did in Gaza. It was a secret that wasn’t a secret. Everything was known, but no one talked about it.

Back then, there was nothing like Breaking the Silence [An organization of veteran soldiers who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the second intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.]. 

Correct. So when these pictures were published on TV, who came and said, “No, we don’t do that”? The Shin Bet security force and the security forces in the territories. These are “semantics” that stayed with me.

In that sense, too, the book was groundbreaking.

The more violent images were taken in 1984, the book came out in 1986. Say whatever you want in terms of DNA, etc., but it was the first intifada that put an end to the denial. It was only because of phrases like “Break their arms and legs” (the quote is attributed to Yitzhak Rabin during the first intifada) that people suddenly realized that this was indeed happening.

The Bus 300 affair erupted in 1984, very much during those years.

Yes, the Shin Bet then claimed that it was a one-time thing. I knew Alex (Levac) took the picture. I felt that my series showed that violence is an everyday thing, that it showed the price of “security.”

So maybe we should really go back in time, you were born in Canada. How did you actually get here?

Oh, that’s the next book. I landed in Israel because my stepmother said she would buy me a ticket if I went to Israel. I was 19. I had a small camera with two rolls of film, I wasn’t at all a photographer yet. I was studying at the university, and on a break after my third year, before beginning my law studies, I went to England for a trip. Then I arrived in Israel. I didn’t know anyone, but I had the address of Kibbutz Kfar Menachem and the name of a family I could reach out to. Then I fell in love. That’s really the subject of my next book.

When did you start taking photographs?

You’re living in a kibbutz and working, and then you look for something else to do with yourself. And there was a photographer there. I asked him “Do you think I can handle a camera with one hand?” I started experimenting with small cameras, and did a few things on the kibbutz. After six months, I looked into studying photography at Hadassah. It was a two-year course. During the last six months of my studies, the Yamit evacuation took place, and then the Lebanon War broke out. I barely went to school.

In Yamit, I met a photographer named Esaias Baitel who influenced me, and I started hanging out with him. We went to Lebanon together. He made a living from photojournalism, and he loved having company. I learned from him to be exacting with myself with respect to photographs. His ethos was that if you photograph every day and have one good picture a year, that’s great. There were no compromises. It’s a standard that can’t be met all the time. But it was an important lesson for me.

Were the photographs a visual expression of some existing political outlook or did a political outlook that is also visual take shape as you wander about?

I don’t think I came from a political mindset, but rather a humanitarian perspective. I studied law, I know about human rights. I believed in it, and I knew there were principles. But I wasn’t a political person. And if I participated in a sit-in at the university, it was because I followed the crowd. Although I lived in a kibbutz that was considered “leftist,” and it was nice that we shared things, I wasn’t active. When I started photographing and seeing the totality of things it was from the humanitarian side, but you could say that politics adopted me.

In what sense?

Suddenly, I realized there was a side. I learned what the argument was about. I saw the outrage over Yamit. How could it be 2000 people standing on a roof and saying we won’t come down? Who are these people? I understood that these were the “Baruch Goldsteins” [an American-Israeli religious extremist settler, who perpetrated a mass killing in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in February 1994, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and wounding 125 others.] I knew Baruch Goldstein personally, I even photographed his wedding.

Slowly but surely a broader picture emerged, and things took shape. Things fell where they did. There were workers in the kibbutz from Gaza, but I accepted that they came in the morning and left in the afternoon, and I could work with them. No one asked, is there exploitation? Are they resentful? I came to terms with reality like everyone else. I didn’t go out to take pictures to prove anything, it was a discovery. And I learned a lot from speaking with other photographers and journalists. When you go out to take pictures, you see things you don’t see just watching the news on the couch.

And what about the things you don’t see in the book that Leibowitz lamented? Why didn’t you film things like “Progress,” or the “Zionist ethos,” the “Jewish genius”? Did you contemplate then about why you didn’t take these photographs, or did it not matter to you?

It didn’t interest me. Like the photographer Diane Arbus, I was looking for the weird thing, not that which goes without saying. Suddenly in the Golan Heights, you see someone preaching to his community, you snap the photo, and maybe it jives with what you want to say, and maybe not. I won’t go into a banker’s office and ask to photograph because I need to strike a balance.

What was it like for you to photograph violence? How did it affect you afterward?

I related to it as photography. I can’t say that I wasn’t able to withstand what was happening, I think I accepted it through the camera viewfinder and looked for frames. I tried not to be afraid sometimes. I slept at night. As for the hardest part with the police, I realized I needed to get out of it someday, and the same thing about the Lebanon War. After a few months, I already realized it was addictive, that it was unhealthy. You can get addicted to the adrenaline, it has heroism and good pictures. But why should I do that? And the day I finally made that decision, my friend came to the kibbutz to pick me up to photograph in Lebanon, and I didn’t go with him. He was the first photographer to enter Sabra and Shatila. I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. But yeah, look at what a coincidence.

And what can we say about Robert Frank? I’m thinking about the tension between the personal and the general, and about not trying to “tell the whole story,” not getting the whole picture. The most direct influence from the international field is The Americans. And you two corresponded for 25 years.

Yes, of course, I was familiar with the book, like everyone else. I had a direct dialogue with one or two pictures. For example, including my family from the kibbutz in the book. There’s another picture, at the Tomb of Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari) in Safed, a slightly crooked frame. My book tries to explain something just as Frank’s book had, but the frames aren’t similar to his. I photographed what I encountered.

From my acquaintance with Frank, he didn’t intend to start a revolution in the United States. He was looking for the images. And that they wrote that he was a critic, and then didn’t want to publish his book in America, branding him as a knight of the “political,” I think that’s not right. He had a side that saw the white baby with the black nanny, and it was an amazing moment. He saw the black people at the back of the bus, but he didn’t intend to be a “revolutionary” photographer. He doesn’t photograph like Sebastião Salgado who photographs drought. After The Americans, he immediately got into personal things, which is what interested him. And in this context, I see the parallel you’re hinting at. But I think my third book, Tel Aviv Mon Amour, is also a personal experiment, which of course inevitably embodies a political reality. I went where the wind took me, but eventually, it too became a political book.

How did you meet him?

I sent him In Our Image.  He wrote me back a letter in response asking, “Is this what you think of Israel, of living there?” I wrote to him about the occupation and what I had seen. He started talking about being a Jew and about antisemitism. That’s how our relationship began.

The name of a book is like a secret. Can you let us in on it?

The English title of the book is In Our Image. Leibowitz claimed that because it was “not a picture of all things,” he would prefer another name. That’s how we landed on “Pictures from the Land of Israel,” for the Hebrew edition. It was a compromise between him and me, thanks to my publisher. The English edition came out under the title In Our Image. As for his text in the book, I made the mistake of my life. I’m sitting across from Leibowitz, and bring him Joseph Koudelka’s book Gypsies as an example, and ask him to “write something short like that.” He says, “I don’t think I can write so little.” I wanted a brief preface because that’s what I knew from photography books, and I didn’t fully understand who I was sitting in front of, and what worldview he validated for me. I only knew he was a genius. It should have been the opposite: 100 pages of Leibowitz and one photograph of mine.

​​And what happened after the book and the exhibition?

Half a year after In Our Image came out, I left the kibbutz and moved to Canada for six years. I would come to visit in the summer, and I had friends from the world of photography, from whom I learned that the book had become important. Luckily, I wasn’t a part of it. In Canada I immersed myself in a whole story cut off from Israel, I shot a few hundred rolls of film there. When I came back to Tel Aviv in 1993, I started photographing again, and then the book Tel Aviv Mon Amour was published. Again I felt connected to what was happening. The book came out shortly before Rabin was assassinated. And once more the political, again the question “Why isn’t the peace agreement moving forward.” And on the other hand, it was a book of love for the sensual and provocative Tel Aviv. Both things together. Of course, the direct reference is to Hiroshima Mon Amour [Alain Resnais, 1959].

As we’ve nearly finished, as a photographer who makes books, is there anything important about bookmaking that everyone should know?

In 1996, I started teaching at Bezalel, and I realized that everyone needs to find their own path. The role of a teacher is to guide people to find their truth. And only the person themselves knows whether they’re “fooling everyone” or making something real. For a book to be justified, you must try to be honest about what you want to do. To make a book is to dive into your own depths.

What book should we add next to our library?

Noa Ben Shalom, and her book Hush.