Mediterranean
This show, which offers another view of Mediterranean culture, probes layers of longing for the West and modernity but also of the East's deep roots.
Two bodies of work are on display: a group show of professional photographers specializing in various genres–photojournalism, nature, portraiture, documentary, street and studio photography of still lifes–and works by the late amateur photographer Shmilu (Shmuel) Ahishahar.
This article addresses several topics: the Mediterranean culture reflected in the participants' work, the longing for the East amid the dominant Western culture; professional photography vs. its amateur counterpart; the reality the viewer perceives.
The participants have chosen their object of observation in the "place" of their artistic activity. The photographs are deeply embedded in the Mediterranean modus vivendi and its various components: climate, nature and landscape, human and urban landscapes, the conflict between religions and ethnic groups in Israeli society and in the Mediterranean basin.
Photography sustains "the place," and "the place" sustains photography. Either way, the photographers and the place whose reality they document exert a mutual influence on each other.
The term Mediterranean culture means to restore the cultural prestige and superiority to the Mediterranean countries that have been damaged by the modern perception of the East as backward and severed from modernity. The West attributed this backwardness to what it perceived as a repressive and ignorant society in need of the West's civilizing and reanimating mission.
The concept Mediterranean culture thus replaces the "Orientalist" image of the East with one free of negative connotations.
The photographs' reference to the East generates an exotic and esthetic object of desire. They counter the negative connotations of the Orientalist, Levantine concept of the Mediterranean environment.
In this respect, Edward Said argues in his book Orientalism that the West's longstanding romantic attitude toward Asia and the Middle East affected the West's judgment of these regions and successfully steered its colonialist ambitions, since the East was weaker than the West during the last centuries of the second millennium. Said's main critique targets the false representation of Eastern characteristics, arguing that it serves historical, political and economic purposes.
Ever since its establishment the State of Israel has grappled with the question: to be European or Oriental? Is our main dilemma as a people to build here a "Vienna along the Yarkon banks" or, perhaps, to create a new "Levant"? The photographs thus reflect a society swaying between two desires: belonging to the West, with the back turned to Mediterranean culture, and connection to the roots: the warm sun, the bustling cafés, the tank tops and shorts, the Greek influence on the music and the taverna culture–don't all these confirm us as Mediterraneans?
From its earliest beginnings photography in Eretz-Israel has used a documentary approach and, along with formative texts, invented the "new Jew." No longer the diasporic Jew seen in Leo Kahn's and Shlomo Nerinsky's early-20th-century photographs, or Avraham Soskin's yishuv figures, including Hashomer members, against Orientalist pictorial backgrounds or settings that reflect the local style prevalent here at the time, but handsome figures with ample forelocks in the photographs of Zoltan Kluger, Beno
Rothenberg and others in the years preceding and following the state's establishment.
All these photographs were no doubt a dominant factor in shaping the people's public consciousness about its national living space.
The first photographers in Palestine were engaged mainly in documentation without raising esthetic questions. National institutions, such as the United Israel Appeal and the Jewish National Fund effectively prescribed the act and essence of photography so that it would serve the national goals of that period–the early 20th century. While many models of the "new Jew" in this "committed photography" were conceived in Europe, they were actually inspired by the Arab. Some of the founding fathers viewed the Arab as the paragon of belonging, existentially and naturally connected to the land, the antithesis of the stereotypical diasporic Jew. They perceived the latter as weak, too spiritual and rootless, as opposed to the well-rooted, independent, authentic Arab who lived in harmony with nature. The East was thus not only a refuge from Jewish exile in Europe but also a source of vitality and a space vital to the renewal of the individual's and the nation's character.
Contemporary photojournalism, on the other hand, hones the dialectical tension between esthetics and politics reflected in the photographs of Hadas Parush, Ancho Gosh, Gil Nechushtan, Gil Eliyahu Biniat, Ohad Zwigenberg and Eivind H. Natvig. Photojournalism crosses the defined boundaries of "realist" photography, it documents here-and-now events, and brings to the newspaper further layers, depths and interpretations of reality, as well as an artistic and political statement of the event and the "site." The photographer knows what he is looking for, not only in order to please his editors but also to offer his unique angle and statement.
By virtue of their function, these photographers are dispatched to centers of
friction and to stories that "sell." Their works probe deeper than those of amateur Facebook photographers, and their occasionally incisive statements deserve attention and deciphering. Yet a quick perusal of social networks reveals that their good works do not usually garner viral recognition, as opposed to anonymous photographers who star in various interest groups under the title "photographic artist" or "artistic photography."
Have matters turned upside down? Do esthetics now have the upper hand? Have and superficiality outwitted artistic quality and statement?
In her photographs Hadas Parush renders tangible a swath of the complex life in the region. A dark empty house, an orphaned dining table, a bare landscape seen through the window, longing for redemption. Another photograph shows a green farm field, edged by bare hills reminiscent of dark mountains hiding the unknown beyond them. The military presence only enhances the sense of transience and fragility. In yet another photograph a flock of sheep is grazing in a grassless pasture. Is this a vacuum, an allegory? A shepherd dressed in red raises his hands, rushing to leave the somber place, with the red trailing behind him.
Ohad Zwigenberg photographs a conflict wrapped in enticing colors. A pastoral Jerusalem during the flowering season is facing the Gate of Mercy (the Golden Gate) and the Dome of the Rock, so strongly associated with the Old City. And if we're talking about the Messiah, let him come on a noble white horse in a classical Hollywood scene. Another photograph shows a demonstration of ultra-orthodox Jews in defensive positions, a hard, disturbing scene orchestrated by a head producer to enhance the visual effect.
Gil Eliyahu sways between reality and a utopian world, between an ordinary reality and a disturbing complexity. A photograph of children in a field of red flowers–a natural situation as though it belonged to a local tourist guide
eager to sell a vacation package–can easily be interpreted also as threatening. The color red can evoke negative connotations, and the Arab village as an authentic inviting place in the background can be perceived as threatening and disturbing. In the same vein, another photograph by Eliyahu shows a military unit preparing toward what may be a ceremony close to the Greek Orthodox church in Capernaum. Is there a dialogue here, cooperation? Are the barriers being removed? Or is this the sovereign's action at a site that is the cradle of Christianity?
Gil Nechushtan flips meanings. The photograph's subject, visual language and composition prompt the viewer to interpret a sports photograph displaying the great joy of the winning group as a war photograph, and a photograph that at first glance seems tranquil and quiet, as the calm before a storm.
Ancho Gosh creates a parallel universe in his works. A legendary Palmach fighter with his Sten slung on his shoulder turns in one photograph from sovereign to persecuted. In another, the biblical scene of Moses on Mt. Nebo raises the question: are we there yet? No, we are not.
An exceptional photographer (in the exhibition though not in terms of photojournalism) is Avishag Shaar Yashuv. Using documentary language she portrays figures who have jettisoned the comfortable Western culture in favor of another lifestyle. Her photographs document the daily life of alternative communities in northern Israel, which live without property and intensely long for simplicity and nature as an antithesis to the materialist culture of the West.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes post-modern society as suffused by media and hi-tech, and individuals as trapped in a world of simulations, spectacles, communication networks, etc., thus gradually losing
all connection to external "reality." The social, the political and even reality itself are gradually emptied of their meanings by a hypnotic flood of fantastic, dizzying, random, blurring media simulations. The inhabitants of the Baudrillardian world live in hyperreality and suffer from lack of orientation, as though they were caught in a vertigo caused by artificial visual material.
The technologies of the new media no longer reflect reality but, instead, create an increasingly dominant hyperreality that subjects reality to itself. Since individuals in this society have interiorized these models, the boundary between hyperreality and daily life has become blurred.
The 21st century–the Internet and social networks era, the world of "likes" and endless sharing of materials identical in all respects–is an unclear period for professional photographers.
Thus, a beautiful face is worth many likes, while a deep statement is worth many less. But there is more than this: the photograph of a "beautiful face" affords us an ephemeral pleasure and passage to the next beautiful face, without stimulating any thought. The next photograph conveys something that claims our attention to details, one must stop and probe it in depth, focus… Yet both vanish in the fast feed update.
In the other body of work, the late Shmilu Ahishahar presents photographs from the Mediterranean basin as an amateur, generic photographer who documents the reality he sees. Mixing daily scenes and fantasies, he creates a Mediterranean idyll. In his utopian voyage, he focuses on Israel and the nearby Mediterranean region as a defined and identified place where nature and the city blend into a single essence. These qualities and style endow his photographs with a clear direction and a sort of meta-gaze, allowing him to build compositions that convey optimism and hope.
The generic photographs can be seen as countless replicas in the social networks, whereas professional photography defies imitation, since photographers with longstanding experience have achieved a unique fingerprint.
Kobi Kalmanovitz photographs portraits. With his distinct vision, he translates a visual language into an artistic statement that extracts the subject's essence. The necessary background enhances the atmosphere, statement and the subject's character. Portrait artists use a range of ways to extract the best of their photographic object. Kalmanovitz was paid for photographing people, as this is both his profession and art. Most photographers of the social networks photograph for likes only, that is, for exposure that would bring them not work and real publicity but a like-based popularity in the social media.
Portrait photographs feature further layers, eminently described by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida, where he states that when he feels that the lens is observing him he prepares himself to be photographed: "I decide to 'let drift' over my lips and in my eyes a faint smile which I mean to be 'indefinable,' in which I might suggest, along with the qualities of my nature, my amused consciousness of the whole photographic ritual" (p. 11).
Like a narrative, a photograph will never be able to capture the "real" figure. Barthes states that a field of forces operates here: "In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art" (p. 13).
Yossi Eshbol and Dror Galili are nature photographers, at times interested
more in nature than in photography. They are exceptionally sensitive to the environment, and their works have become objects of research. Eshbol photographs the hoopoe, Israel's national bird, referred to as a symbol of wisdom in Jewish texts, and his patience has been rewarding. Galili photographs the sun rising in the East, large and red, with migrating birds flying against its background, and thus seems to capture both an ethos and a pathos.
Felix Lupa and Erez Ben Simon photograph street scenes where they capture the "decisive moment" of being and distill it into a statement about the place that is firmly rooted in the Mediterranean basin: are the people of this region warmer and friendlier than those living in colder climates because they spend much of their lives outdoors in the public space? Through their photographs Lupa and Ben Simon expand the discourse to the cultural, esthetic, social and anthropological context.
Jan Tichy and Sagit Zluf Namir photograph still lifes. Zluf Namir photographs a red watermelon with a piece of medical cotton on top. The esthetic quality covers the uncomfortable, disturbing sense the work elicits. A summer fruit associated with the sea and vacation, saturated with authentic intense red is in a state of decomposition. In another photograph Zluf Namir shows us a cactus with an egg yolk inside, a fertilization that will never ripen into a fruit, an intense color trapped inside the "sabra" dilemma of being authentic but not indigenous. Tichy, who grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Israel and works in the USA, has photographed two complementary photographs: the yearning for the West and acceptance of the East. On a lace napkin, a symbol of the European West, lies a fleshy yellow leaf, symbol of foreignness, which tries to integrate and manages to blend into the surrounding space. Another photograph shows a small, red paper baking cup with crimped edges and at its center a dark, opaque shadow as a
paraphrase of Plato's allegory of the cave: is this reality or an illusion? Yearning or resignation? Tichy's sense of foreignness prompts him to create universal works with broad statements about society, culture and place.
The Norwegian photographer Eivind H. Natvig works in the Mediterranean region. He is sent to conflict zones and those that holders of an Israeli passport cannot enter. With a sensitive photographic eye Natvig presentifies reality for the viewer, yet something else is at work here too. As an observer Natvig shows us a daily, regular, banal yet not simple reality in these regions, which grips us indirectly. As the viewer probes these photographs more deeply their color and light, the subjects' expressions and their background hone his recognition of ordinary people facing the clash between civilizations and powers competing for status and influence.
Karel Cudlin, a Czech photographer from Prague, has visited the Mediterranean region enough times to feel connected to its culture and lifestyle. He documents Israel, its natural and human landscape with the eyes of someone who doesn't live here and is not familiar with local nuances. In his photographs he uses charged symbols that connect the photograph to the "place." Is this the same place, the same homeland landscape seen by local photographers who are accustomed to the Eretz-Israeli lifestyle, culture and landscape?
Yuval Tebol's project Land Studies spans over more than a decade. In the past three years Tebol has studied the photographic gaze and language, as well as the contents of his works. With an analog, medium-format camera and blackand-white film he creates series of triptychs and tetraptychs that he has disassembled and reassembled. Still, he is free of both the commitment and the claim to depict the place "as it is." While he photographs the disassembling process is reflexive and emotional, unplanned. He interprets
the landscape quickly and emotionally, almost unconsciously. The reassembly, on the other hand, is a deliberate, esthetic process.
Nelli Sheffer's photographs always leave room for a story, they elicit feeling and longing, pleasure and passion. Light is ubiquitous, caressing and enhancing succulence and freshness. In these photographs people are cooking according to their customs, religion and tradition. The surroundings and decor are an integral part of "the swath of life" that conveys information beyond the first glance.
As part of the series Altneuland Amit Sha'al wandered through Israel to adjust the old to the new, collecting photographs from personal albums and public archives.
In the photograph, his hand is holding the old picture in precise proportions against the background of the contemporary place. Sha'al has been on a quest for old photographs of Eretz-Israeli figures and sites. In all his photographs, he pits an old photograph against present reality. The eye begins almost automatically to look for and discover differences between the photographs-what has changed over time, what is missing, what was added, what time and humans have done to the place.
Sha'al's photographs bring to mind the series The Brown Sisters by the American photographer Nicholas Nixon, who has photographed his wife and her three sisters year after year since 1975. The considerable traces time has left are visible in the photographs: new wrinkles, the morphing nature of the gaze aimed at the camera, the varying gestures and the changes in the hierarchical structure among the four photographed women.
Dubi Roman expresses an impressionist vision of nature through photography. In mysterious, spiritual photographs that seem to erupt from nature he captures the play of light in landscapes and fields, in forests and amid their special flowers. Roman's "impressionist" technique is based on several consecutive exposures, each shot in a different sharpness and brightness from a hand-held camera to allow natural movement between the exposures as a result of the photographer's body movement.
Ofer Blanc photographs the date palm, which is so strongly associated with the place, the authentic Oriental tree well rooted in and adapted to its environment. From the tree's base a building rises, a sort of modern tower of Babel, its head planted in the sky. The technique of long exposure blurs objects, extends and blends them to suggest the wish for union and symbiosis between East and West, strangers yet complementary to each other.
"Is a new Mediterranean culture possible? People shouting at the café chantants in Spain, those who roam around the Genoa port, along the piers in Marseille, the robust, curious species living along our shores, they all descend from the same family." From Albert Camus' 1937 inaugural lecture at the Maison de la Culture in Algiers.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981.

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