The Grand Rabbi, The Mattress Maker and The Israel Museum

...Well over one hundred men, and some intrepid women, trooped to the East to practice their arduous craft...

...This period is of special interest to Perez...

...he calls: "There / will have a party...

...As an example, Perez alludes to a pair of photographs by Bonfils...

...an unusual view of the Jaffa Gate by Tancrede Dumas, who, though he often scraped Bonfils' name off a negative and inserted his own, seems to have made this one himself...

...And naturally the photographers had to grease palms in order to get certain shots...

...Every twentieth-century photographer of importance is included...

...A year later, in April 1978, though photographs had been accumulating in corners throughout the Museum since opening day in 1965, the Photography Department was officially inaugurated, with Perez in charge...

...Bonfils #632 has been called "The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem...

...Communication between people: that has always been the long and short of it," he concludes...

...Newman, together with his wife Gus, recognizing the timeliness of Kollek's vision, went forth...

...Even then, and in the present century, too, there have been few competent Jewish photographers in the area...

...Awash in notes for his book, planning an autumn exhibit of holograms and a January Bill Brandt show, smoking too many Time cigarettes, he says he may not be able to attend the November bash, that he's not much of a party-goer anyway...

...Perez answers that for Jewish scenes there was little demand...

...But the photographer did have to make certain decisions if he wanted to sell his Jewish studies...

...What photographer doesn't use models from time to time...

...It was when the ingathering of prints began to get out of hand that the decision was made to form a bona fide department with walls and a full-time curator...

...a unique Bonfils albumen print of the Jerusalem railroad station...

...And this project in particular had the auspicious Kollek ring to it...

...Then, too, what about the pictures of religious Jews...

...Then, like a fond duenna, he shows off his charges...

...For four years, he has been doing the,'-research for an encyclopedic project, a survey of photography in the Middle East during those decades...

...Earlier, the painterly Narinsky, whose gravures are earning increasing esteem, worked locally...

...Each guest will be given his own camera and film, and the world's most illustrious photographers and photography buffs have been invited to take pictures of the guests and each other...

...His collection of about 5000 items has in its short lifespan become one of the world's choicest...

...One understands why photographs of the Middle East must be the cornerstone of any collection at the Israel Museum...

...Janet Quinn Tassel's article, "David Sharir's Imaginings," appeared in moment, May 1980...

...Photographs, he said, were already being assembled, from the archives of the Bezalel Art School and other local sources...

...Then he shows some of the Museum's rarities: perhaps the only existing calotypes of Gethsemane and Jerusalem made (in 1855) by James Graham, an Englishman who was the honorary Secretary of the London Jews Society in Jerusalem...

...This year they will be busier than ever, for it is their turn to plan the party given by the AFIM...

...Will you take care of it...

...And such sites as Rachel's Tomb, the Machpelah and the Tombs of the Kings crossed sectarian lines...

...There are not, says Perez...

...For over an hour Perez shares his expertise, his speculations, and his marvelous prints...

...Where praying Jews were involved, Perez believes, particularly before the latter part of the century, another possibility is that the several converted Jewish photographers in the Holy Land were able to gain the confidence of their subjects...

...Perez unlocks the door to the storeroom, talking about the Department's forty Salzmanns, not singular to the Museum, and about some of the holdings that may be unique...

...Another notable example is a pair by Sergeant H. Phillips, putatively two separate groups of Ashkenazi Jews, but both using exactly the same men, in different garb, their positions shuffled about...

...After choosing the self-taught Perez, the Museum sent him abroad (with the financial assistance of the ten original partisans) for more than a year of training—to London...

...For instance, why are there so few specifically Jewish scenes from the nineteenth century...

...but Salzmann—ah, Salzmann was sublime...

...They donated from their own collections, they stalked the flea markets and auctions, they plied their friends...

...This convergence of talent on one corner of the world has no parallel in the history of art...

...In his treatment of chiaroscuro, his composition, his almost surrealist approach to his material, Salzmann in Perez's estimation was a hundred years ahead of his day...

...Perez knows of no native or foreign Jewish photographers of any significance in the Holy Land, except for converts to Christianity, until the very end of the century...

...But let's face it: with our late start, we'll never be able to equal the Museum of Modern Art in American photographs or the Biblio-theque Nationale's European collection...

...a very rare calotype by the Rev...

...Here we enter a zone of disputation...

...He calls his Department the Gulag: "it's freezing and I'm slaving...

...If the Law buttresses such apprehension about the fixing of images, why then are there so many mid-nineteenth-century pictures of Jews...

...An excellent opportunity for comparing nineteenth-century Holy Land photography with these i>ther media presented itself in the exhibit prepared by Perez at the Museum last summer, "Sights and Sites in Jerusalem, As Seen in Nineteenth-Century Prints, Drawings and Photographs.'-' Photographs of familiar Jerusalem scenes were juxtaposed with watercolors or color- lithographs in which the same scene had been transmuted into the Picturesque Sublime, which of course was what many buyers preferred...

...No buyers, no pictures...

...Anything local is bound to have the greatest emotional pull with us...

...Bonfils was a master," says Perez...

...Local" in the context of photography means the Holy Land and the Middle East, and artistically it means the nineteenth century, when the "local" artists were predominantly French and English— and non-Jewish...

...This show will be composed of the Museum's own holdings and loans already contracted for, including the only known surviving daguerrotypes of the Middle East, from the Gernsheim Collection in Texas...

...Thus the Englishman Peter Bergheim, the best known of the converts, perhaps utilized ancestral perquisites to become the first photographer allowed to photograph Jews at the Wall...

...Until the latter part of the century, pictures of "Jews" were actually pictures of models...

...In 1978, when the Department finally opened, the original supporters formed an official fund-raising affiliate of the American Friends of the Israel Museum, calling themselves Friends of the Photography Department...

...But for all its hustling commercialism, photography in that time and place escalated to one of its greatest artistic summits...

...There is probably no one answer to this tantalizing question...

...Clipping along, past vaults and crates, under pipes and around bundles, Perez chats animatedly about his collection, gesturing, impatient to show his "gems...

...Newman and the other stalwarts in New York, Paris and London foraged, photographers, dealers, and collectors found themselves parting with valuable items at budget prices, fine collections were included in legacies to the Museum, and photographers of the stature of Ansel Adams and Duane Michals donated pictures...

...Two of Bergheim's Wall photographs appear in Wilson's 1864 Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, the only work in the Survey not done by Sergeant James McDonald or W. Hammerschmidt...

...But mostly these people—including the most Orthodox—were delighted to have their pictures taken...

...to Paris, where he was supervised by Levy...

...Scheduled for November 10 at the Lincoln Center Library, the dinner dance, emceed by Alan King (cost: $500 a person), will benefit the entire Museum...

...After all, it's our little spot on the map...

...Perez, born in Turkey, came to Israel in 1967, joined the Museum staff as one of its three photographers in 1976, and in 1977 was hired by the Museum from nearly 100 applicants to be Curator of Photography...

...The Old Testament (and the Koran aswell) prohibits the making of human images...

...Dark, intense, an over-smoker, the 34-year-old Perez is the prototypical curator—enthusiastic, overworked and underassisted, perpetually behind in a gruelling schedule...

...Look, thanks to all our friends, we have a broad representation, and of course we must continue to widen our spectrum...

...But photographs of synagogues, though good ones exist, are scarce...

...And largely through their efforts, the acquisitions grew, enriched with masterpieces by the great pioneers of the nineteenth century and the giants of the twentieth—not least among the latter a group of BrassaT vintage prints and one of the world's important collections of the works of Man Ray...

...However, for great photographs of the Holy Land and the East, we must look to the nineteenth century, and to European photographers...

...The official opening ceremonies were hardly over when Mayor Teddy Kollek cornered Newman, an old friend, and said (something like), "We've got to get started with a Photography Department...

...They are images made—and immediately developed—in boats at dawn, in deserts at noon, on the tops of mountains and minarets, and at the bottom of parched wadis and infested ditches...

...Thus, apart from religious or political considerations, the area has provided photohistorians with a rich lode for new discoveries and dissertations...

...These, says Perez, are only two instances among many, some of which include the photographers themselves posing as Moslems or Jews...

...Gerard Levy in Paris, Dorothy Bohm in London—and the group set about its work...

...Perez introduced a couple of his rarities in this exhibit, including the "world premiere" of Quarelli's "Mur de Salomon oil les Juifs vont pleurer," which, because of its date (1875), the angry worshipper, and other factors, he concedes might be unposed...

...Salzmann, who made 174 large calotypes for the archaeologist de Saulcy, represents to Perez the one who most clearly understood the special light of Jerusalem...

...and gaps, particularly in nineteenth-century work, will be closed by future gifts, many already bequeathed...

...The Museum's policy, to place Israelis in key positions and train them up to exigent standards, is typified by Perez's program of study...

...And Teddy Kollek, too...

...His voice echoing in the corridor, Perez discusses why Middle Eastern photography is pivotal to the Museum's collection...

...But more important, our strength should lie in Middle East photography...

...Conceivably this accounts for the number of Bonfils' striking Jewish studies...

...In his book, Perez will publish new material on his favorite from that hardy crowd: Auguste Salzmann, an Alsatian archaeologist-photographer active in Jerusalem in 1854...

...and the feeling is heightened by affinities for this beleaguered "little spot on the map...

...These, like all calotypes, must be kept from the light, carefully separated with tissue, and forever protected from the depredations of time and haste...

...relics—an ancient helmet resembling a mysterious winged creature or dancer, the severed head of a fallen idol...

...In addition, the images elicit particular "Jewish questions...

...Its theme, however, reflecting the preoccupation of its planners, will be a photographic "happening...

...It began on opening day of the Museum, May 19, 1965, an event that Newman was covering for Look Magazine...

...The nineteenth-century Romantic fascination with things exotic and oriental extended from Rossini to Flaubert, from Byron to Delacroix...

...It is the nineteenth-century gems that Perez is eager to show, selections from the work done in the Holy Land and the East from 1839 through 1880...

...To alter reality was to appropriate some of the craft of the painter or the graphic artist, some might argue...

...He has said that he wants the Department, its library and its new teaching arm at the Bezalel—as well as the Visiting Artists program at the Museum—to be central to the formation of a core of fine Israeli photographers, "so that our photographic heritage will no longer depend on pilgrims from other lands...

...Or he could submit his "truth machine" to the reality of the Jew's condition, whether his "Jew" was authentic or a model...

...But the exhibit also demonstrated how common a practice it was for graphic artists to make direct, even trace, copies of photographs...

...These they sold to their customers waiting at home or as souvenirs to the wealthy travelers who had come, pith-helmeted and parasoled, to see for themselves...

...From extraordinary daguerrotypes made in 1844 or earlier to the newest laser-beam holograms, the acquisitions represent each step in the chronology of photography since its inception in 1839...

...And what photographers they were...

...The problem is that both clearly are the same man...

...But Tim Gidal, the photo-journalist and historian who now makes his home in Jerusalem, calls the whole argument a waste of time...

...They marshalled a group of photographers, dealers and collectors— people like Roman Vishniac, Lee Witkin, Ralph Baum, Dan Berley, Len Zoref and Richard Mazer in this country...

...He could clean up, charmingly costume, and otherwise idealize the nineteenth-century Holy Land Jew, who was after all poor, sick, an object of contempt...

...Thus there has always been trepidation about the camera among the Orthodox...

...Arnold Newman, one of America's pre-eminent photographers, was a natural choice for the honor of inaugurating the Department with his work...

...First, he displays the Salzmanns: spectral, abstract close-ups of fragments and structural details...

...At the turn of the century, there was I. Raffalovich (who later became Chief Rabbi of Brazil) as well as a few others...

...But will I see you at the Middle East exhibit...

...The Museum will publish the book in late 1983, to coincide with its first comprehensive exhibit of Middle Eastern photography...

...He could cause him to appear even scruffier than he was—the fulfilled prophecy of the miscreant outcast...

...One was Yaacov Ben-Dov, whose work—a valuable documentation of the yishuv—was the subject of the Museum's first photography book, published in 1978 with Perez as co-editor...

...From the first photograph taken in the Holy Land, an 1839 daguerrotype of Jerusalem by Frederic Goupil-Fesquet, through the early twentieth-century work by the enterprising Bonfils family, many of Europe's finest cameramen came, lugging their cumbersome apparatus to photograph under appalling conditions the lands and sites with names familiar to Westerners from the Bible and legend and repeated military excursions...

...This is how we learn our past and establish our identities...

...Besides being the Department's first supporter, he was for the twelve years preceding Perez its ad hoc curator...

...Asked about his staff, he says, "You're looking at it...

...Other experts have advanced theories as varied as that the subjects were prostitutes or indigents eager to do anything for a few paras, to the speculation that some of the Jews might have been blind and thus unaware that they were being photographed...

...And cameramen, making capital of fashion, scurried to the East to capture "real" images of the languorous faces, strange costumes, and fabled domes that were, all the rage...

...633 is known as "The Cotton Cleaner" or more commonly "The Mattress Maker," surrounded with the utensils of that trade...

...and to the United States, where he studied with Newman and held an internship at the George Eastman House in Rochester...

...He and Arnold Newman will have much to celebrate since that day in 1965, one felicity being a recent anonymous five-year commitment for photography acquisition, another the fact that the pavilion itself is now being discussed as moving from blueprint to reality...

...George Bridges of Saint Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, taken in 1846 or 1847...

...A photography pavilion had been one of the modules designed into the original plans...

...Of course some pictures are of models," he says...

...Nissan Perez, Curator of the Israel Museum's Photography Department, strides from his Department, a one-room office in the Museum's basement, to the photography storeroom...

...The Jerusalem exhibit was the fifth major show mounted by the Department—which is to say Perez, with an occasional assistant—since April 1978, when the Department was formally inaugurated with an exhibit of ninety works by Arnold Newman and selected items from the Museum's collection...

...When we leave Nissan Perez, he is alone in his Gulag preparing the next day's photography-history lecture at the Bezalel Art School...

...Who can refuse Teddy Kollek...

...The welter of photographic activity in Israel now has made observers confident that a core of first-rate artists has been formed...

...They invoked the name of Teddy Kollek...

...A partial list: Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Candace Bergen, Harry Callahan, John Denver, David Hockney, Anne Jackson, Diane Keaton, Andre Kertesz, Duane Michals, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Eli Wallach and Andy Warhol...

...Carney E. S. Gavin, Curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum, who has made a specialty of Bonfils, tends to agree, stressing that the Bonfils family were an engaging lot, and that the amiability factor might be a key to the number of sitters they impressed into service...

...In the East a photographer still can't make a day of it without shelling out baksheesh all over the place...

...The Law is clear that one must not make a graven image and that it must not be an image to be venerated...

...The exception was the Wall, which especially in its French rendering Le Mur des Lamentations or Le Mur ou Les Juifs Vont Pleurer had a certain plaintive cachet...

...Perez is one of a number of historians who believe that the Bonfils too were converted Jews (though the conversion would have taken place much before pere Felix's time...

...How was it possible to get such shots...

...And Bonfils, whom some consider peerless...

...The space will be set up with various kinds of photographic and studio equipment, including the famous giant Polaroid 20" x 24" camera...

...Primitive peoples, too, have traditionally feared that their spirits would be "taken" along with their images...

...As each picture is turned, we have to keep reminding ourselves of the hardships sustained by the creators of these views...

...Nostalgia of course informs the special feeling imparted by these gauzy calotypes, these grainless mauve and sepia albumen prints, the cartes de visiles, and the stereographs of people and places long vanished...

...Also prolific during the yishuv was J. Benor-Kalter, remembered for his gravures and robust-chalutzim postcards...