The local Arab leadership, although organized in its opposition to Jewish settlement, made little use of photography in its information system and in the campaign over the image of the conflict between the two peoples. Arab photography was photography of individuals, without a directed hand, a fact that is especially noticeable considering the way the Jewish photography was initiated and organized. The Arab photographer served more as a documentary photographer, a kind of “anthropologist-photographer,” rather than as an enterprising and politically active photographer.

The exhibition seeks to refute the claim that during the period in question, photography was, for the most part, institutional-Zionist. It presents the avant-garde, experimental independent Jewish photography that will be used for commercial purposes (including commercial and industrial photography) or done in an “artistic” way that was free from dictates that might had arisen from the circumstances of the invitation.

The exhibition consists of four parts: Zionist-institutional photography, Arab photography, Jewish avant-garde photography and the reconstruction of the space in which Helmar Lerski presented the series Jewish Soldiers in the exhibition “Weapons and Economy, Peoples and Land” held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1943.

Rona Sela

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