Animal Attractions

A pair of exhibitions at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv show wildlife and nature in all their radiant beauty, while also suggesting that the clock is ticking toward their ultimate disappearance

By CARL HOFFMAN
cool looking monkey521 (photo credit: Courtesy Eretz Israel Museum)
cool looking monkey521
(photo credit: Courtesy Eretz Israel Museum)
Does anyone remember the movie Soylent Green? Let me refresh your memory.
Made in 1973, the film is set in a nightmarish, dystopian future United States. In the filthy, overcrowded New York City of 2022, upwards of 40 million ill-clad, underfed people wander daily through a thickly polluted haze, sleeping in dilapidated shacks, junked cars, abandoned buildings, and even in the halls and stairwells of filled-to-capacity apartment buildings and tenements. Homeless people swarm the streets, and most of the population survives on weekly rations of green, high-energy wafers called “soylent green.”
Based loosely on a science fiction novel by Harry Harrison titled Make Room! Make Room!, the movie Soylent Green was generally a rather mediocre movie with a few good scenes.
Among the most memorable of these is one in which old Solomon Roth, played by Edward G. Robinson in his last film role, decides to escape life’s day-to-day horrors by availing himself of the government’s voluntary suicide program. Roth arrives at the gleamingly clean facility where a kind young nurse ushers him into his own comfortably furnished, refreshingly air conditioned death chamber. He is given a bed to lie on, administered a slow-working lethal injection, and allowed to go slowly to sleep while listening to soothing music from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, and watching beautiful film sequences of nature and wildlife, now vanished from a severely polluted earth.
Roth’s friend, New York City police detective Robert Thorn – played by a young Charlton Heston – rushes to the suicide center in hopes of saving old Roth, arriving just in time to see the tail end of the nature and wildlife film. As Roth drifts into eternal sleep, Thorne stares mesmerized at the film, watching animals he has never seen frolic in exquisite natural settings lost long before he was born. Thorn’s eyes fill with tears as he manages to say only, “How could I have ever imagined?” A concurrently running pair of exhibitions of wildlife photography, now on at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv show wildlife and nature in all their radiant beauty while also suggesting that the clock is ticking toward their ultimate disappearance.
For almost half a century, the “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” exhibition, sponsored by London’s Natural History Museum and the BBC, has showcased some 100 photographs selected in an international competition. Now in its 49th year, the exhibition has been brought to Israel for the first time by the Eretz Israel Museum.
In honor of this achievement the museum has mounted an accompanying local exhibition, called “A Picture of Nature,” displaying photographs of Israeli wildlife taken over the past three years. The works of more than 40 Israeli photographers were chosen by a jury, from pictures by hundreds of photographers who submitted their work in a preliminary contest.
In addition to the pictures chosen for the competition, several already well-known Israeli nature photographers are also showing their work, including Yossi Eshbol, Amir Balaban, Eyal Bartov, Doron Horowitz and Doron Nissim.
How do Israeli wildlife photographers stack up against their international counterparts? “The images are different, because the wildlife in Israel is different,” says Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, general supervisor of the two exhibitions.
“The wildlife in the world is amazing.
You cannot compare it to the wildlife here in Israel. But the community of wildlife photographers in Israel is very strong and very aware of all of the local ecological issues. They’re all nature lovers. They put in a lot of time and effort in order to get the picture. You talk with them and come to understand their way of living, how they manage their day-to-day-lives – according to what’s going on outside, according to the weather, to the passage of animals, especially birds. It’s fascinating.
“At the same time though, here in Israel, we have very, very few photographers who actually make their living out of nature photography. You can count them on one hand, actually. Most of them have their day jobs. A lot of them come from the field of hi-tech, and their passion, their big love, is nature and nature photography.”
But are they as good as the photographers in the international exhibition? “Yes, they are,” says Moran Shoub, curator of the Israeli exhibition. “But I will not compare Israeli photographers to other photographers all over the world.
This is an artificial division.
It’s about a photographer’s personality. I’m not comparing or contrasting Israelis to other photographers.
I think it’s more about the photographer as a person.
Okay, the light and the weather are different here in the Middle East than in Africa or North America.
The light is different. The trees are different, okay? The situations are different, but the difference has nothing to do with any difference between an Israeli personality or, say, an American one.
“Here we show two kinds of nature photographs. There are close-up captures of just the animal, and there are broader photographs that show the animal’s relationship to other animals, to its environment, and to the circumstances in which the animal is living.”
SHOUB MAKES no secret about which kind of wildlife photograph she prefers. As she states in her introduction to the Israeli exhibition, “The vast majority of photographs we received for ‘A Picture of Nature #1’ exhibition show a magnificent animal in the center of the frame; but the center of the frame cannot tell us where the animal is. True, it is on grass, or perhaps on the bank of a pond, but as in the photographer’s studio, against the backdrop of a curtain, it is isolated from the landscape, disconnected from its surroundings, disconnected from its species. Disconnected from life, disconnected, disconnected, disconnected. It is the photograph that disconnected it.”
Thus, as she began to organize the Israeli part of the exhibition, Shoub made it clear to the participating photographers that “an exhibition of animals is not a field guide; not a bird field guide, not a wild animal field guide, not an insect field guide, not an underwater life field guide. Abundant nature photographs tell a story, they do not mount animals like mounted butterflies, with the objective of keeping them safe in a drawer.”
The resulting Israeli exhibition thus leans heavily toward showing wildlife in its broadest possible contexts. And in today’s world of shrinking natural habitats, constantly deteriorating natural environments and ever-increasing encroachment by people, those contexts are not always pretty.
Of course, as one would expect, there are still many pictures on display in both exhibitions that look like the kind of photographs one would expect to see in coffee table wildlife picture books, as well as in magazines like Nature and National Geographic.
Photos of this sort, in fact, comprise the majority of works on display. But the most compelling photographs paint grimmer pictures.
We have, for example, Hedva Shefaram’s picture of a male ibex seeking its next meal by rummaging through the garbage at the Metzukei Dragot camping site. Bartov provides us with a depressing view of dead great white pelicans near the fish ponds around Gan Shmuel after they were shot by guards—the result of an ongoing battle between fish farmers and migratory birds.
Balaban shows us a similarly ongoing battle between the natural environment and spreading urbanization with his photograph of a male ibex inspecting his dwindling habitat from the top of Mitzpe Naftoah in Jerusalem, while the busy cloverleaf highway roads of the Golda interchange loom almost menacingly in the background.
Similarly, in the international part of the exhibition, Anna Henly’s photo shows a polar bear drifting precariously through arctic waters on a small chunk of floating ice; while Paul Hilton presents a tableaux of thousands – literally thousands – of sawed-off shark fins, piled up and ready to be prepared for soup in Taiwan. A photographer known simply as Jabruson shows us a terrified yellow baboon, its hands and feet tethered with rope, held captive by a bunch of African children. The monkey was caught when its troop, forced by the disappearance of their natural habitat, raided local crops. The children seem almost to be glowering defiantly into the camera as they hold the terrified little baboon. And last but not least, David Chancellor presents us with a photo called Trophy Room, in which a distinctly unpleasant-looking lawyer in Texas sits in his study, a room literally crowded with stuffed dead animals – many from endangered species – which he shot during big game hunting vacations all over the world.
“Wildlife Photographer of the Year” and “A Picture of Nature” are important exhibitions that anyone with an interest in nature, wildlife or good photography should see. And as we visit these exhibits and view the photographs, we should realize that it may not be possible to see many of the animals and habitats these images show for very much longer. Our children’s children may have no way to see tigers, ibexes, white pelicans and polar bears other than in old photographs and videos.Both exhibitions are running concurrently until September 2 at the Eretz Israel Museum, 2 Haim Levanon Street, Ramat Aviv. For more information: (03) 641-5244 or www.eretzmuseum.org.il