The turning point

Curator Yuval Beaton explores the roots of current Israeli photography.

By DAVID STROMBERG
Gérard Allon: The doorbell (image for a Matti Caspi album cover), 1976. (photo credit: COURTESY ASHDOD ART MUSEUM)
Gérard Allon: The doorbell (image for a Matti Caspi album cover), 1976.
(photo credit: COURTESY ASHDOD ART MUSEUM)
WHEN YUVAL Beaton, curator of the Ashdod Art Museum, recently opened the exhibit “Drive-In – Israeli Photography in the 1980s,” the overwhelmingly positive response confused him. He compares it to when two people break up, and one asks the other, “What did I do?” and the other says, “If you don’t know what you did, I’m not going tell you.” Beaton appreciates the praise the exhibit has received from artists, curators and critics. It’s just that no one will tell him what he did.
Beaton’s confusion arises in part from the fact that he did not set out to “define a key turning point in Israeli culture” or “fill a curatorial and historical vacuum in Israeli art” – both of which the exhibit, nevertheless, does. He set out on this project because the topic was close to his heart and somewhat neglected by museums and critics alike.
“The exhibit’s time frame is 1973-1992,” explains Beaton. “We called it the 1980s because that’s the center of activity. But the story is a little wider.”
The story Beaton tells begins after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and ends with the launching of Channel 2 on television in 1993 – two seemingly disconnected events that Beaton argues had a direct impact on photographic culture in Israel. This time frame also parallels two important moments in his own life: he was born in Ashdod in 1970 and entered Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1992. At Bezalel, he studied photography with the same people he is now exhibiting.
Beaton’s personal path from studying photography at 22 to curating a museum at 45 is also part of the story, since without him it might have taken even longer to put the spotlight on the emergence of art photography in Israel. And, in hindsight, what’s remarkable about the events behind this emergence is the way personal coincidences and cultural forces came together to create what are today considered the country’s photographic institutions.
The year 1973 marked a watershed moment in Israel on almost every front. On the one hand, the “glamor days” of the Six Day War in 1967, when the country doubled its size and defeated all Arab countries, were brought to an abrupt end. On the other, it was the year when Americanization really arrived in Israel, including with the first and only drive-in movie theater in Israel located on the site where Hapoel Tel Aviv’s basketball stadium now stands.
This was also the period when young people started leaving Israel after serving in the army. Some of those young people were artists who went to study abroad, many to New York and London. These included those who wanted to study art photography, since in Israel the only place to study was Hadassah College in Jerusalem, which focused on the technical rather than artistic aspect of photography. This small number of individuals didn’t necessarily know each other but they all studied photography as art abroad and then began returning to Israel between 1978 and 1980 – degrees in hand.
In December 1978, journalist and critic Adam Baruch released the first issue of Monitin, which featured in-depth articles and large color images. The staff photographer was Micha Kirshner, who graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975. What made Monitin different from former magazines was that Kirshner, who had studied art, had editorial input in his images – such as in his portrait of Yom Kippur War general Ariel Sharon in which a line from the Bible.
Also in 1978, Camera Obscura opened its doors as a time-share photography studio in Tel Aviv. In 1979, photographer Simcha Shirman – who’d been in New York and completed a master’s degree from the Pratt Institute in 1978 – returned to Israel.
He suggested opening an evening photography course and Obscura developed into the city’s first photography school.
Parallel to this, photographer Hanan Laskin, who had studied in Australia, had undertaken an effort within Bezalel to incorporate photography into the curriculum.
It started in the early 1970s, when he began teaching in the art department where photography was being used more as a tool to document performance and conceptual work. Laskin understood that there was a need for a separate department, but it took until the 1980s before the complex process of receiving approval from the Council for Higher Education was completed.
“This was really the first meeting point,” explains Beaton. “You had these young people who went out and studied photography abroad, and you had this push for the process to open a photography department at Bezalel. These people became its first teachers.”
While all this was happening, exhibition spaces also started recognizing the need to give photography its due attention. In 1977, Tel Aviv Museum hired photographer Micha Bar-Am as the head of its department of photography. In the early 1980s, Nissan Perez was hired by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as the first formal photography curator (the seminal Arnold Newman had been the museum’s informal curator from its opening in 1965). And, in 1978, the White Gallery opened its doors on Rothschild Blvd. across from the Habima Theater focusing solely on photographic works.
All this set the stage for the emergence of photography as a new and exciting art practice in the 1980s.
“The Ashdod exhibit really follows the rise of photographic culture in Israel,” says Beaton. “There was a whole scene that was created. You had the local newspapers (Kol Ha’Ir in Jerusalem and Ha’Ir in Tel Aviv) that talked about clubs, theater, and culture. And they were all photo- based.”
Starting in the 1980s, students graduating from the newly created photography schools and departments had choices of where they could work – media, teaching, museums, galleries. And yet there was something also anachronistic about its development.
“To understand the Israeli scene we have to understand that it was 1979, which was when iconic New York artist Cindy Sherman appeared and took photography into postmodernism. But this was missed in Israel at that point. The teachers who had come from New York didn’t know what was going on in the US because they were already here.”
This led to the Israeli aesthetic maintaining a modernist tradition while many in the art world were moving beyond. The central teachers in Israel had studied with such photographers as Arthur Fried and Philip Perkis, both of whom worked in the style of the 1960s and were brought to Israel to teach workshops. Another influential artist in Israel was Robert Frank, who’d had a part in forming the modernist tradition.
Frank worked closely with Camera Obscura cofounder Michal Rovner.
“Frank was important because, through him, it was possible to justify what was going on in Israel at the time,” says Beaton.
“He was also versatile enough, experimenting with image manipulations, to be a master photographer for a lot of different people.”
Growing up during this time, photography became “the issue” for Beaton. By 1983, he had his first camera. “If I was going to be an artist, I was going to be a photographer.
It was like punk music – anyone could be an artist.”
Photographic images also infiltrated popular culture through literature and music.
Avi Ganor became the editor of the Am Oved publishing house and replaced its old watercolors with photos. Record covers became more than portraits of the musicians – they developed into artistic sleeves based on photographic works, less informative or illustrative than interpretational. “One central figure in this was Gérard Allon, who was a staff photographer for CBS Records in Israel,” says Beaton. “What’s special about him and why we exhibit him is that his record covers connect directly to his work as an artist.”
All this energy and activity culminated, in many ways, with the first Israeli Photography Biennale in 1986 at the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, which brought together the country’s entire “scene.” But, as Beaton points out, once you have a scene, you also have a conflict.
The second biennale, in 1988, was curated by Adam Baruch, who brought newspaper photographers into the museum – introducing the concept of “art chronicle.”
Considering the effort they put into having their field recognized by the art establishment, artistic photographers were against this move. Of course, this position was itself outdated – American Diane Arbus had already crossed the line from commercial to art photography in the mid-1940s. By the time the third “biennale” was organized, which was actually three years later in 1991, a foreign curator had been brought to deal with a thematic subject “death and memory.”
That’s why Beaton believes 1992 was really the end of this cultural moment. The launching of Channel 2 took away the life source from newspapers and magazines – advertising. By then, too, Israeli students had already heard about what was going on a different visual language.
Beaton identifies the last “nail in the coffin” as a 1994 exhibit curated by Rona Sela, a Bezalel student who went on to work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She looked at the works of well-known Israeli visual artists who had used photography in their works – such as Rafi Lavi, Micha Ullman, and Michael Druks – and argued that they were more relevant than the photography teachers because they left “straight” photography.
Her theory was used to break away from the teachers who had established Bezalel’s photography department and move beyond black and white into manipulated and color works. This, more or less, aimed to erase the generation that had established photography as an art in Israel.
“The main paradox here is that [this generation] wanted photography to be recognized as art,” explains Beaton. “But for this war of independence to succeed, they needed to separate themselves from art. If it had already been considered art, you wouldn’t need a separate department, a separate gallery, a separate curator. Today, we don’t ask whether we need a gallery for photography.
When I speak to Laskin today, he says that you don’t really need a separate photography department anymore.”
Beaton started studying photography right at the moment when the shift from the old generation to the new was taking place.
“While I was learning from the older generation,” he says, “I already understood that there was something else that was postmodern. The studies were within this conflict. It’s as if they were teaching me the fine print but I knew that the fine print wasn’t really important. I was no longer responsible for creating accurate images. I wanted the images to be fuzzy. They taught us the appropriate and we were looking for the inappropriate.”
From Bezalel, Beaton moved to New York, where he first studied film and then entered the master’s program at Hunter College in Manhattan. He had moved from photography to conceptual work – working with yarn and knitting – but ultimately decided to return to Israel and finish his degree at Bezalel’s master’s program in Tel Aviv. It was during this time that he met Israel’s mythological curator, Yona Fisher, and was taken under his wing.
“I arrived in Ashdod from New York in 2004,” he recalls. “I looked for a job while I was studying at Bezalel. I lived nearby and decided to work at the museum as a guide. I met Yona in the hallway several times and we talked. He was working on a photography exhibition celebrating Ashdod’s 50 years. When he understood my background, he asked me to be his assistant.”
In 2009, Fisher left his official position, though he continued to consult at the museum until 2011. In 2012, the museum celebrated its 10th anniversary together with Fisher’s 80th birthday. Starting in 2013, Beaton, together with associate curator Roni Cohen-Binyamini, began their fully independent exhibitions – the first of which was titled “Until you get out of my voice” and exhibited artists whose families came from Arab-speaking countries.
“Our desire to focus on continuity comes from working with Yona,” says Beaton.
“Contemporary art tends to try and forget the past. But our chase after the ‘now’ needs to be understood with the roots of the present. In working with Yona, I realized that you don’t really get taught that.”
This is why the current exhibition of Israeli photography in the 1980s is so close to Beaton’s heart – it explores the moment when he himself entered the world of art.
The show is imbued with the crossing of generations – between modern and contemporary Israeli art – and includes the work of more than 25 top photographers.
Beaton says that because the Ashdod museum is new and isn’t in direct competition with other collections, it allows them to work from a position of looking at Israeli art in all its layers. This is an approach that others don’t often follow and it leaves the Ashdod Museum to do such intergenerational shows as 2010’s “In the black distance: Lea Nickel and Khen Shish,” which brought together two female painters, one established and one contemporary. “You can communicate with different audiences that way,” explains Beaton.
Being behind while also finding oneself at the forefront is something that has characterized Beaton from his youth.
“Growing up in the periphery, you know that something is happening somewhere else,” he says. “But you don’t know the rate at which it’s happening. So you create your rhythm – which can sometimes outdo others.” 