| In 1949, he helped to found Kibbutz Malkiya
on the Lebanese border and later worked as a locksmith, mounted guard, and youth
instructor at the Kibbutz Gesher-Haziv in Western Galilee. Never merely a detached witness
of his country's history, people, and landscapes, Bar-Am began to photograph seriously in
the early fifties, although his interest in photography started as a teenager. Using borrowed cameras until he bought himself a vintage Leica,
Bar-Am recorded in a small notebook the exposure times and lighting conditions of every
photograph he took. Slowly his work began to be published. In 1957, he became a
photographer-reporter for the Israeli Army magazine Ba-Mahaneh and was on its
editorial staff for ten years. He has photographed the Israeli Army ever since, covering
the Six-Day War in 1967 with Cornell Capa, recording the war in 1973 at the Suez Canal and
documenting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He served as a photographic correspondent for
the New York Times in Israel from 1968 to 1992.
Bar-Am has called Israel his "lifetime
assignment" and his pictures are visual statements about the fascinating complexity
of Israeli life. Rooted in photojournalism but shaped by an artist's eye, his work belongs
to the tradition of such photographers as Robert Capa, Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith. |
| Many are images of daily life during
wartime, which do not depict direct combat as much as they do the traces of conflict.
These include a crowd of people looking for names on the surface of a Holocaust Memorial
wall and a fashion show held on an army base for the entertainment of a crowd of soldiers.
The works in the exhibition are not so much about the nation's history as it is about the
traces of history in everything from daily life to echoes of Bar-Am's own struggle, the
rewards and frustrations of attempting the improbable task of observing and participating
in the events as they are taking place. Since
assisting Cornell Capa in 1968 to create the landmark exhibition Israel the Reality
at The Jewish Museum in New York City, Bar-Am has been heavily involved in the work of
other photographers as a historian, and since 1977, as curator and founding director of
the Department of Photographs at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a position he held until
1993. He has since returned to his own photography. See also, letters from friends and
associates: |
