Taking a different angle

A photography exhibition at the Israel Museum explores the immigrant’s view of new surroundings and culture.

By BARRY DAVIS
2 guys sitting old style black and white 370 (photo credit: courtesy)
2 guys sitting old style black and white 370
(photo credit: courtesy)
We are all immigrants, says Nissan Perez, the man who put together the show “Displaced Visions: Emigré Photographers of the 20th Century” at the Israel Museum.
The exhibition, which opened three weeks ago and runs until October 5, reconsiders the work of nearly 100 key figures in photography from the perspective of how their standing as immigrants affected their creative vision.
Perez, senior curator of the Horace and Grace Goldsmith exhibition at the museum’s Noel and Harriette Levine Department of Photography, has thepersonal collateral for the job. Not only has he been the museum’s chief photography curator for 37 years, he made aliya from Turkey as a young man.
“But we are all emigrés, aren’t we?” he notes when we meet at the museum’s café. “You came from Britain; this museum, right now, is full of people who may have come from Russia, Morocco, France, the United States, you name it.”
He continues, “One of the thinkers in France said some time ago that every project we do has something autobiographical in it. For me, this exhibition definitely has something autobiographical. I am an immigrant, too. Over the course of my career, I have come to realize that most of the masters of 20th-century photography were immigrants.
That may have been by choice or by necessity, but they moved from one country to another at least once, and some did it several times. We know that the 20th century was a century of migration.”
“Displaced Visions” is Perez’s swan song at the museum, but he leaves with a bang, and with an emotive collection of works that span over a century of creations by artists from an array of countries and cultures.
“I wanted to do this exhibition also because as far as I know, in photography, being an immigrant is one of the aspects that has never before been considered,” he observes. “For me it was important to see what happened to those photographers who moved from one place to another, one culture to another and from one visual environment to another.”
Perez has assembled an impressive roll call of leading exponents of the art. German-born British photographer and photojournalist Bill Brandt, who became known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes, is feautured, as is 88- year-old Swiss-born Jewish photographer Robert Frank – who, according to Perez, is still alive and clicking.
Frank was one of the guiding spirits behind the photography branch of the New York School of thought, an informal group of American artists from a wide range of disciplines, including poetry, painting, dance and music, who were active in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. The artists involved often drew inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movement.
“Displaced Visions” also includes items by Andre Kertesz, a Hungarian-born Jew who relocated to Paris in the 1920s and then to the United States following the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Initially Kertesz struggled to gain acceptance of his then-unorthodox camera angles and style, although today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.
Meanwhile, Man Ray, born in Philadelphia as Emmanuel Radnitzky, went in the other direction, moving to Paris in the 1920s and living there for the rest of his life – aside from an 11- year furlough back in the States after he fled war-torn Europe in 1940.
Hungarian-born photographer and painter Laszlo Moholy-Nagy experienced even more transitions – both in terms of his country of residence and his lifestyle. He was born in 1895 into a Hungarian Jewish family and converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church in 1918. He became a mainstay of the Bauhaus school in Germany and was heavily influenced by constructivism; he was a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. After World War I, during which he served in the Austro-Hungarian army, Moholy-Nagy lived in Vienna and Berlin before a two-year sojourn in England. From there, he went to Chicago, where he lived until his death in 1946.
According to Perez, all these photographers, as well as the others featured in “Displaced Visions,” brought added value and an extraneous element to their adopted milieu.
“Photography is one of the most mobile creative media. All these artists needed to do was to get hold of a small camera, so for them, it was quite easy to start analyzing their new environment,” says the curator.
That, he notes, necessarily entailed the approach of the outsider looking in, and bringing a fresh perspective to the locals’ view of themselves.
“We can see that in most of the images in the exhibition, there is a certain distance between the new places and the photographer’s position.
I would say that this is the case right through the 20th century, from the end of the 19th century, when communication and travel became much easier, and people started moving around a lot more.”
Of course, that is particularly true with regard to the United States, which became a haven for so many important Jewish and other artists fleeing persecution in Europe, and later in the Soviet Union. That was also the case in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, although in the earlier part of the century, relocation was generally motivated by positive artistic objectives.
“People like Man Ray and many of the Spanish artists, and [those] from Eastern Europe, went to Paris, which was a very important center [of the arts], at least until the second World War,” Perez continues, adding that the foreign influx enhanced the local arts community.
“Paris became a melting pot of ideas, and there were reciprocal influences between the artists. Most of the artists in Paris at that time were from outside France, and each came with his own set of visions, ideas and cultural influences, and that created something unique at that point in history.”
The curator says that the global village began long before the Internet took over. “For me, globalization started at the beginning of the 20th century – it is the move of artists, philosophers, etc., and the influences they brought to their new country. You can see that in this exhibition, and we put in some of the photographers’ earliest works that they created in their new environment. Some of these images have never been exhibited in public before.”
The plush-looking catalogue of the exhibition opens, naturally enough, with the oldest print in the show, “The Steerage.” It is what one might call a definitive emigré effort, taken in 1907 by Americanborn Jewish avant garde photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Although Stieglitz himself was not an immigrant, his parents came from Germany. The Steerage is considered one of the defining shots of the 20th century.
There are also some locally produced works, including an imposing image of former JNF head Menachem Ussishkin and his wife, taken in pre-state Palestine by German-born photographer Alfred Bernheim, who made aliya and died in Israel in 1974.
“Parlormaid” and “Under-parlormaid Ready to Serve Dinner,” which Brandt took in his adopted country of Britain in 1933, is a prime example of the outsider’s extrinsic vantage point, says Perez. “That is a picture which no Englishman would have taken, simply because he would not have thought there was anything noteworthy about two maids, in full uniform, waiting by the dinner table. Only a foreigner would have taken a photograph of something like that. People who come to a country from somewhere else look at the reality over the local’s shoulder.”
The same might be said about Moroccan-born oleh Gérard Allen’s 1983 photograph “Bus Tickets,” and possibly his somewhat surrealist picture “Sunflower Seeds,” which has the Hebrew word for them, garinim, misspelled next to them. The spelling mistake may or may not have been intentional, and the two photographs form part of Allen’s “Postcards from Israel” series.
But the newcomer’s perspective was not always appreciated among the locals. In 1958, for example, Frank published The Americans, a book of photographs that the indigenous population in question did not embrace with enthusiasm. It was first released in France, and only a year later in the States, where it took quite some flak.
“That is probably because he showed the Americans to themselves in a way that they considered not too complimentary,” Perez proffers. “He showed the working classes, and the sort of downside to life in America, while the Americans wanted only to look at the positive things, and all the glitter and glamour.
He put a mirror in front of them and they didn’t like what they saw.”
The Americans eventually achieved seminal status.
AFTER almost four decades at the Israel Museum, “Displaced Visions” is not a bad way to bow out for Perez.
“I have done around 180 exhibitions over the years,” he notes. “That applies to the Israel Museum and elsewhere in Israel, and also abroad. I have done exhibitions in the States, France, Sweden, Germany, Austria and twice in Turkey.”
He says it was particularly gratifying to return to his native country as a bona fide curator. “I went back there and addressed the audience in the museum in Turkish. My mother was there, in the front row, and she was overcome with joy.”
After so long in the field here, Perez is better placed than most to pass judgment on whether there is a distinct Israeli take on the art of photography.
“I think you can say there is such a thing as Israeli photography, because most of our artists, and that does not only apply to photography, are very strongly connected to the local reality – political and social – and a lot of their work references this material,” he observes.
Even so, our photographers also adhere to universal guidelines.
“The vernacular of Israeli photographers is international,” he continues, “but their involvement is mostly of a political nature. Our photographers are much more political than, for example, American photographers, but in the widest sense of the term.
Here, political is social, environmental and all sorts of things. The concerns of the Israeli photographer are much more down to earth than those of the American photographer.”
The public will be able to get more of a handle on the position that Israeli photography and photography in general hold in the wider scheme of things this Tuesday and Wednesday, when the two-day “In A Strange Land: Perceiving and Interpreting Unfamiliar Environments” symposium takes place at the Israel Museum.
Gracing the event, which Perez is overseeing as well, will be a glittering array of intellectuals from across the globe. Prof. Svetlana Boym from Harvard University will deliver an address on the subject of “Nostalgia, Estrangement and Off-Modern Space,” while Prof. Malcolm Le Grice from Britain will talk about the “Influence of European Emigré Artists on the Development of Experimental Cinema.” French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy is also on the list of guest speakers. The local academic and arts communities will be represented by Prof. Michael Levin from Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, Prof.
Hagai Kenaan – whose lecture goes by the name of “An Unfamiliar Familiarity: Photography and the Everyday” – and Perez, who will enlighten the audience about the current exhibition.
“The idea is to approach photography in a multidisciplinary way,” the curator says. “I am very excited about the symposium, and we have some wonderful speakers coming – particularly Bernard-Henri Levy, who is a very busy man and is coming to Israel for 24 hours only.”
Because of the eras in which they were taken, most of the prints in “Displaced Visions” are monochromic. However, there is an intriguing series in color from 1976, courtesy of Greek-born American Lucas Samaras, and there are some other contemporary works by artists who feed off seemingly disparate cultures – such as French-resident Japanese photographer Kimiko Yoshida, and Vietnamese-born American Dinh Q. Lê.
The final slot in the catalogue brings the audience right up-todate with a two-channel video installation called The Library Room by Soviet-born Israeli artist Ira Eduardovna. The Library Room shows the viewer a variety of angles and perspectives – much like the rest of the exhibition. ■
For more information about “Displaced Visions: Emigré Photographers of the 20th Century”: (02) 670-8811 or www.imj.org.il. For information about the “In A Strange Land: Perceiving and Interpreting Unfamiliar Environments” symposium: (02) 670-8895/6.