For Bar-Am, the photographic act is driven by passion. He is attentive to various types of action while attempting to reveal something that lies beyond the realm of facts, and his images are marked by a unique personal language. As he himself remarks, "Together they create a personal, unique language."
The year is 1973. The time is the eve of the Yom Kippur War. The country's political and military echelons are in a state of total denial. A shrill alarm siren shatters the familiar personal and social routines of life in Israel.
Life does not resume its former course. In the midst of the rising shock and panic, the independent photographer Micha Bar-Am sets off to document the war. Carrying several cameras, he heads south to the Sinai Peninsula, to the heart of the battles, and begins shooting. Now, forty years later, Bar-Am returns to his photography archive to offer viewers a new perspective on the Yom Kippur War.
Bar-Am is an Israeli photographer whose work is identified with the country's major historical events and with the Israeli landscape. "The subjects I have been concerned with," he says, "all reflect, in different ways, central events in the history of Israel – events that I participated in or observed as a witness." [1]
Israel's wars are a central concern for Bar-Am given their status as significant milestones in our collective and historical memory, and his works capture visual codes, metaphors, and symbols associated with the world of war. War is related to death, mourning, various degrees of trauma, and physical and emotional pain – as well as to violence, survival, and the infliction of similar scars upon the other.
Some of Bar-Am's images resonate with explosions, shouts, heated debates, and cries of lament, while others capture moments of silence – moments of calm and grace or ones of fear and dread. Bar-Am photographs the war up close, and manages to capture every imaginable site and situation: bunkers, minefields, attacks, caring for the wounded, soldiers falling in battle. When one is within a war zone, one feels that life in the outside world has been suspended. Bar-Am's war photographs are meditative in some instances and dramatic or ironic in others, yet they always reflect the unique experience of entering a different spatial, temporal and emotional zone.
Bar-Am's photographs, most of which are black-and-white, are all meticulously executed. They are shaped by a sensitivity to details that come together to form compelling compositions, and often involve a play of light and shade.
Curator: Raz Samira