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The Shekel Before the Storm GA Magazine / A land, and a man, of rough edges By David B. Green Tags: Israel news, GA, Jewish world Full coverage of the 2008 GA conference Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of Maxim Salomon's photojournalism is the shortness of the period this fantastically creative - and difficult - man produced his most important body of work. The lion's share of the journalistic work on display at the Eretz Israel Museum exhibit "Maxim Salomon: Reportage, 1947-1957" was shot for Uri Avnery's sensationalist tabloid Ha'olam Hazeh, where Salomon worked for only one year, and the Israel Defense Forces weekly Bamahaneh, where he worked for the next five. Advertisement Even if you grew up in the decades when magazines like Life or the British Picture Post brought the world into your home each week by way of powerful photo essays, you may have long since forgotten the sweet anticipation that accompanied the moment when you opened up an issue and began to page through it to see what surprises it contained. Walking through the small Dekel Pavilion at the museum, where the Salomon show will be up until the end of the year, you may feel a similar feeling of excitement, and also participation, as still photographs - especially when they come without the texts that originally accompanied them - often demand the active use of the viewers' imagination, if they want to understand the story being told. Salomon, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1922, was one of the men who brought this country the kind of photojournalism popularized by Life. To judge by the essay Avnery contributed to the catalog, Salomon was not a pleasant man and he played by no rules except his own, but from a distance of more than half a century, we can afford to simply enjoy the photographs he brought back from the field without having to worry about how many colleagues or subjects he stepped on to acquire the shots. "He didn't recognize any official authority, and he didn't pay attention to any rules," writes Avnery. "Sooner or later, he fought with everyone around him. ... But none of this mattered when compared with his dedication to his mission: to get the photograph he wanted at any price, to overcome any obstacle. Thus was established a tradition that generations of photojournalists have aspired to keep alive." Even if you are unable to read or understand the minimal Hebrew labels that accompany the exhibition, walking through is a delight. For instance, take the 1951 photograph of a new immigrant - an old man captured by the camera shortly after his arrival at the Sha'ar Ha'aliyah transit camp in Haifa. He sits passively as a hand reaches in from the left of the frame and sprinkles DDT powder on his head. From the other side of the frame, a finger pokes him below the shoulder, pushing him toward the shower of powder. A 1954 series from Bamahaneh depicts the life of a Gloster Meteor fighter-plane squadron at an Israel Air Force base: In one photo, a technician with a bare, bronzed chest wearing shorts and an old-fashioned kibbutz-style tembel hat meanders out toward a plane. Today we may be used to scenes of engineers in clean jumpsuits dashing out to the runway to service a jet in as short a time as possible, but this guy looks like he has all the time in the world. In another shot, a raffish Ezer Weizman sits in the tiny cockpit of his Meteor, either before or after a flight, and in the photo next to that, we see the former air force general and Israeli president being visited by his wife, Reuma, and son Shaul, at about age 4, who stands on a generator wagon in an (unsuccessful} attempt to see into the cockpit of his dad's plane. The overall impression of Israel from its first decade of statehood is of a land of rough edges. This is in part because these square photos, shot with a Rolleiflex 6x6 camera, are in black and white, and in part because it seemed to be raining a lot whenever Salomon was on assignment (a series from the winter of 1954 depicts drivers and bicyclists trying to make their way through profoundly flooded Tel Aviv streets). But the photos also remind us that Israel was a very modest (read: shabby) country in its early years. Kids played with found objects in the streets, which seemed to have very few privately owned cars in them; even in the cities, there were still wide-open horizons, whichever direction one looked. And soldiers dressed in improvised uniforms took target practice with non-automatic rifles. Even the fashion models captured by Salomon are posed against far from glamorous surroundings, and give the impression that they are living in a frontier state. Which doesn't make them unattractive: The photo that greets the visitor at the entrance to the pavilion is of a model standing in front of a scrubby sand dune, hands on her hips, wearing a denim top tied midriff-style above her navel, staring seductively at the camera - a good choice to draw people into the show. Salomon had a great eye, and clearly understood the country he was looking at. His photographs reflect humor, irony, outrage, pride and compassion, but never so much as to be maudlin. One image from a 1955 series on beggars shows a man in stained raincoat and beret holding out a can for coins; he leans, seemingly unaware, against a pillar on which is affixed an election poster for David Ben-Gurion's "Pioneering Front," with a Hebrew text that reads: Too much talking And not enough settlement and development Too much concentration in the cities And not enough on the frontier... Too much pursuit of comfort, profits and wealth And too little productivity, work and pioneering initiative The poster goes on for another four lines in the same vein. Imagine a party trying to sell itself to the electorate by preaching that kind of self-sacrifice today. As reflective and balanced as Salomon's work was, we are told that his personal life was a disaster. As a Haaretz article put it earlier in the year, "he had four official wives, four children and numberless girlfriends and passing flirtations." The catalog features a personal essay (originally written for Haaretz just after Salomon's death, in 1991), in which his daughter Iris Milner, a former writer at the paper, described how one day in 1957, driving north to cover a story about communities under fire in the Huleh Valley, Salomon saw a wooden house on the shore of Lake Kinneret and decided on the spot to buy it, effectively ending his career as a photojournalist. "He threw his cameras into the lake in a dramatic ritual, and the little house with the pretty beachfront and the eucalyptus grove he turned into a club called Minus 206," where others escaping from Tel Aviv could come to water-ski and chill out, Milner writes. Having given up his career on little more than an impulse, Salomon was never able to recapture his early success. He never stayed anywhere - or with any partner - for long; he moved around across the country, straying as far as New York but ultimately returning to Israel, where he died penniless, of cirrhosis, at age 69. There was little in Salomon's privileged upbringing to suggest the instability of his adult life. He was a sixth-generation scion of one of the country's founding families, who were among those who built modern Jerusalem and the city of Petah Tikvah - a legacy he remained proud of to his dying day. His father, Aryeh, was a bank official, and built the family a grand house on the corner of Rothschild Boulevard and Sheinkin Street, in Tel Aviv. Maxim grew up both there and in Beirut, where he joined his mother at age 5 when she went there to work at a kindergarten for members of the Lebanese Jewish community. He returned to Tel Aviv two years later, but went back to Beirut to study at the American University there. He also studied photography in London. What remains today is the work, and much of that, we are told, has been destroyed, since many of the organizations and periodicals he worked for didn't have proper archival facilities. Solomon's photographs tell the story of a young country with a complex history, both recent and ancient. A series of photos from 1954 show Yitzhak Rabin, then a senior officer, after a parachute jump. We see him folding up his chute after landing, and then trudging through a field with the bulky folded package on his back, as tough and self-reliant as the young country he would eventually lead. We see athletes from around the Jewish world competing at the 1957 Maccabiah Games, decked out in the most inelegant of uniforms; military funerals; a series on soldiers serving time in a military prison; and two charming images that give a taste of the old-world sophistication of Tel Aviv. One of the photos depicts three bearded men engaged in earnest conversation on a park bench on Rothschild Boulevard, each in an elegant hat, a suit and tie, and holding a cane; the other is "The Hotdog-seller Franz Gerstner, Reading Heine, at Mugrabi Square," an image from 1952 Tel Aviv and by now a classic. In it, Mr. Gerstner, dressed in a clean white uniform with white chef's cap, sits by his aluminum vat on wheels, which contains the frankfurters, but clearly his mind is on other matters altogether. He is, after all, an ancient man in a land reborn. Full coverage of the 2008 GA conference Bookmark to del.icio.us   The King is dead Archeologists find new evidence for King Herod's tomb site. Al-Hasbara Israel launches Arabic YouTube channel to bypass Arab media.

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