Jerusalem through the lens of yore

Jerusalem is a fascinating spot; so many civilizations have crossed its path – mostly in not too gentle a manner.

By BARRY DAVIS
The Dome of the Rock in the snow, 1940s (photo credit: MOSHE ‘NIOCLAS’ SACHWARTZ)
The Dome of the Rock in the snow, 1940s
(photo credit: MOSHE ‘NIOCLAS’ SACHWARTZ)
From the middle of the 19th century, visitors to these parts began capturing some of the inhabitants of the ancient city through photographic means.
Members of the public can get a handle on some of the efforts of photographers to document life here, both inside and outside the Old City walls, in the first half of the 20th century. “The Camera Man – Women and Men Photograph Jerusalem 1900-1950” opened at the Tower of David Museum on May 26 and will run until December 12.
The exhibition includes works from 34 photographers, with the proviso set by curator Shimon Lev that all documenters have to have lived and worked in Jerusalem.
The photographers come from different backgrounds – European and local, Jewish, Moslem, Christian, men and women. The prints show the unique way that each photographer documented the many faces of Jerusalem. Many of them recorded Jerusalem residents of different communities. Some were hired by institutions and organizations to capture various historical events that occurred in the city, and others were artists with a more personal and creative agenda.
The impression one gets from The Camera Man is that you are being proffered a street-level glimpse of life here all those decades ago. While there are clearly quite a few commissioned pictures in the lineup, the spread of topics and documenters is such that you come away from the show feeling you are more intimate with the city of bygone days.
“The juxtaposition of different viewpoints and spheres of activity, placing works by prominent photographers alongside less well-known names, reveals a hitherto untold chapter in the history of photography in the country and in Jerusalem’s own history,” notes Lev, who was assisted in the undertaking by associate curator Hamutal Wachtel.
Politics and self-interest do raise their heads here and there. The exhibition catalogue contains three eye-opening articles – by Lev, Jerusalem artist Meir Appelfeld and Ben-Zvi Institute archives director Dr.
Lavi Shay. In his essay, “The Development of Photography in Jerusalem, 1839 to 1948,” Shay notes: “The British administration, the American Colony photographers, and Arab photographers rarely photographed Zionist events and the new Jewish architecture in the city, whereas Jewish photographers took very few photos of Arab nationalist events and the Arab city beyond the Old City walls.”
The Camera Man features a fetching shot of some of the western-style attired families enjoying a picnic by the city ramparts, and Christian Arab photographer Chalil Rissas, who worked with the Associated Press and the Egyptian Al-Hilal newspaper, took a clearly staged, ideologically initiated frame of Jordanian soldiers preparing to shoot at the western part of Jerusalem, outside the Old City walls. Ali Zaarour’s shot of a Jordanian soldier standing in the rubble of the Hurva Synagogue in 1948 is an emotive work, and the same photographer, who worked in Jerusalem between 1931-67, captured the mayhem that followed a car-bombing attack on Ben-Yehuda Street in the same year.
Lev’s decision not to opt for works from the earliest days of photography was partly fueled by the desire to get away from the Orientalist romanticization of Jerusalem and the Holy Land by all kinds of travelers and explorers from western climes. The curator adds that poet Uri Zvi Greenberg took a poor view of visitors who dropped in: “gobbling up small portions of my land with the camera’s narrow aperture.”
By and large, the romantically inclined visitor had their fanciful biblical-fueled expectations of the Holy City doused by a metaphorical bucket of cold water on encountering the squalid conditions within the ancient walls. Moby Dick author Herman Melville was prompted to write: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine, particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening.”
Visiting the city in 1867, Mark Twain, too, was duly disabused, and doubted whether even the most devout of his travel companions could be moved by the sight of Jerusalem, which, he noted, was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants.
Tower of David general director and chief curator Eilat Lieber says the new exhibition happened almost serendipitously.
“There are hard and fast rules in this country regarding the definition of a museum. I discovered that the Tower of David is categorized as a museum because of its photography collection, which was never exhibited.”
It was time to dig into the accumulated documentary treasures.
“The museum’s important collection is in the basements and the archives, and it is completely incidental,” Lieber continues.
“Over the years, many collectors regarded the museum as a good repository for their photographs and the archives grew and grew.”
It was, says the general director, simply a natural continuum.
“There was, for example, a Jewish soldier in the British army, who was here during the British Mandate, who decided the best place for the pictures he took here was the Tower of David. We received a lot of photographs from the Russian Compound, too.”
It’s not just a matter of finding the prints a cozy nesting place.
“We are looking at ensuring the photographs are properly preserved and maintained and placed on the Internet,” Lieber adds.
“The museum wants to unveil its collections gradually, and not just from its own archives. One of our goals is to show collections of photographs of Jerusalem, taken by less-known local photographers. We would be happy if the municipal photography archives underwent a similar process of digitization and preservation. That is very important for researchers of photography and of Jerusalem.”
The Camera Man is, says Lieber, something of a landmark showing for the Tower of David.
“This exhibition helps to position the museum, not only as an innovator in the fields of history and archeology, but also in photography.”
Lev and Wachtel have put together a fascinating array of images, which they culled from an array of sources. One of the leading repositories for pictorial documentation in Jerusalem during the first part of the 20th century was the American Colony religious collective, which built up an impressive collection between 1898 and 1934.
Other contributors to the exhibition include third-generation Jerusalemite Tzadok Bassan; Arthur Bauer, who had a studio in Zion Square; leading professional Yaakov Ben-Dov, who came to Palestine with the Second Aliya and worked in Jerusalem from 1907 to 1960; and Berlin-born Efraim Degani, who in 1945 founded the Photo Prisma camera shop, now located on King George Street.
There were also some women photographers around in Jerusalem in the first half of the last century, such as Polish- born Rivka Kop, who had a studio on Ben-Hillel Street, and Aliza Holtz, who studied photography with fellow exhibitor Alfred Bernheim and specialized in portraiture.
There were also quite a number of Armenians around, including Garabed Krikorian, who documented events in Jerusalem between 1859 and 1918, and Yessayi Garabedian, who studied and experimented with photography in Europe and in Jerusalem and, when appointed as Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1865, opened a studio in the monastery to encourage the use of photography.
If you fancy getting in on the act yourself, the Tower of David invites one and all to trawl family albums, closeted shoe boxes, and your grandparents’ sideboard to add to the wonderful collection of photographs that document the many faces of Jerusalem. Should your exploratory efforts produce the sought-after goods, you are asked to submit good quality scanned images, accompanied by biographical information, details about the occasion or the memories it brings back, and information about the photographer (if known) to: Archive@tod.org.il.
You can also go to the Tower of David Museum every Sunday (by appointment) to scan the photos there.
For more information about the exhibition: *2884 and www.tod.org.il/