The return of Israeli hostages from Entebbe, people in trenches, Ben-Gurion as a private man, these are among the images included in this retrospective of the Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am.
Born Michael Anguli in Berlin in 1930, Bar-Am and his family fled Germany for Palestine when he was six years old. Along with the Anguli family, a piece of Jewish-German culture was thus uprooted, arriving in the port of Haifa on August 1, 1936, aboard the ship Galilea.
Bar-Am’s biography is tightly interwoven with a recurring theme in his photography: the fascinating complexity of life in the Middle East. Without prejudice, but with great curiosity, Bar-Am, a self-taught photographer, began to record life in Israel, his new home country, in the early 1950s. The beginning of his photographic career coincided with and captured the turbulent years immediately following the founding of the new state.
In his photographs, Bar-Am documents civic affairs and military engagements, speaks of survival in the trenches during Israel’s wars, and covers Konrad Adenauer’s visit to David Ben-Gurion’s private home in the desert.
Bar-Am focuses on the human dimension in political conflicts: the fate of Arabs in the border region, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the hopes and hardships of new immigrants in the 1950s, the scars left by the last war and people’s fears as they wait for the next one, or the simple happiness and joie de vivre of people coping with their everyday lives. And this exhibition displays a group of very personal images, hitherto unpublished photographs from the Bar-Am family album.
For more than fifty years, Bar-Am has traveled in the Near and Far East, to Europe and the Americas. He is part of the second generation of “concerned” Magnum photographers who, in addition to working on commission, have spent time realizing their own projects. A freelance photographer, Bar-Am has worked for international newspapers and magazines, and his photos have appeared on the covers of many prestigious publications, including Newsweek, the New York Times Ma- gazine, Stern, and Paris Match. Bar-Am is a founding member of the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, and to date is still the only Magnum photographer from Israel.
Artistically and historically complex, Bar-Am’s photographs show Israel’s particular reality. They demonstrate that living in
Israel is not an issue of either or, but is rather full of contradic- tions, ambivalences, and “in-betweens.”
Micha Bar-Am lives and works in Ramat Gan, Israel. Seventy-five years after he was forced to leave the city, the chronicler of contemporary history returns to his native Berlin where his retrospective show opened in the Willy-Brandt-Haus.
This exhibition is a cooperative effort between the Freun- deskreis Willy-Brandt-Haus and the Open Museums Israel.
Curator and project coordinator: Dr. Alexandra Nocke
Exhibition concept: Dr. Alexandra Nocke and Gisela Kayser, cultural chief of Willy Brandt Haus, Berlin .