"Album hatzalamim: Yisrael 2006" ("The Album: Israel Photographers 2006"), edited by David Gary and Moni Blech, Photo Art Books, 225 pages

I hesitated to write a review of this album of photographs because the truth of the matter is that it doesn't merit one. To publish a book that calls itself "Album hatzalamim: Yisrael 2006" ("The Album: Israel Photographers 2006") and does not include the works of Adi Ness, Ilit Azoulay, Simcha Sherman, Roi Cooper, Sharon Yaari, Yosef Cohen, Yoram Kupermintz, Gilad Ophir, Noa Ben-Shalom, Ilan Spira, Osnat Bar-Or, Efrat Shvili and a whole host of others - is like putting out an album of early Renaissance painting that leaves out Duccio and Giotto. The principle behind the selection of photographs in this book is not clear, and neither is the principle of exclusion. Why this book was published at all remains a mystery to me. Artistic considerations are certainly not part of it.

What the book offers up are advertising photos of the most trivial kind alongside images that at least have some aesthetic intention. It's like advertising copy for Sweet'N Low and a short story by S. Yizhar appearing together in a book called "Literary Gems: Israel 2006." To juxtapose an excellent political photograph by Miki Kratsman with a picture of a chicken steak is beyond insulting. Even the beautiful images end up "polluted" by their proximity to publicity photos.

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Much has been said about how photography has replaced painting and ultimately led to its devaluation. Less has been said, I think, about the crisis facing the art of photography itself. Back in 1859, Charles Baudelaire wrote: "If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally" ("On Photography"). History has shown that Baudelaire was overreacting. Photography has succeeded in becoming an art form, and not just a "very humble servant," as Baudelaire recommended.

But he was right about something very fundamental. He could see the great temptation of photography trying to be "art" without the spirit or magic of painting or art as a whole. This album is as far from classic photography (Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz) as the bulk of contemporary art is from Cezanne, and it goes without saying, earlier artists.

Unpoetic photos

Yaakov Raz, an expert in Japanese culture, compared Haiku poetry to a good photograph. That comparison can also work in reverse: A good photograph is one that conceptualizes something in the same way as a Haiku poem, or some other poem that employs imagery. For photographers, reading poetry should be mandatory. It's like professional literature. Anyone who agrees will find the book very disappointing, mainly because many of the photographs included here are a failed attempt to achieve this poetic effect.

The chief problem in this album is the overabundance of visual cliches: female nudity in an urban public space (a cheap stab at Surrealism); erotic images and food; clouds reflected in a store window; photographers taking pictures; a "natural" woman wearing a wreath and white clothing; a "sexy" woman, wearing jewelry and makeup, with eyes closed to show how passionate she is; the young and restless dressed in bright colors and "bursting" with joie de vivre; skulls in the desert; nude women and flowers; pregnant bellies and landscape; close-ups of breasts; joyful black men playing jazz; homosexuals with whistles and crazy hats; sensuous black skin; black masses of ultra-Orthodox men; Islamic veils and piercing eyes; the popular genre of natives looking straight at the camera; aging, sagging skin; gravity-defying skateboards frozen in mid-air; National Geographic-style pictures of "aesthetically pleasing" animals that look like they were taken in a lab or a shopping mall; and the piece de resistance - a double spread featuring five teenagers wrapped in Israeli flags and wearing bar-mitzvah skullcaps on one side of the page, and mud-splattered combat soldiers in a bear hug on the other side of the page.

A good poem will not talk about the self-evident and the obvious because good poetry is also about discovery, even in the subtlest and most elusive sense. A good photograph will not flaunt images that everyone has seen - images that have become old hat by now. Many of the photos in this book try to create an impression of "poetic" uniqueness, but aiming the camera at a woman in a low-cut dress looking off dreamily into space is about as poetic as writing: "My heart / is blue / but I / love you." That might qualify as a poem, but not a very good one.

I may be generalizing, but the main preoccupation of the photographers in this album is aesthetics. They almost never move beyond it, into the world of spirit. The exceptions, of course, are Kratsman with the photograph mentioned above, Micha Bar-Am with his portrait of the photographer Robert Frank (the contributors to this album would do well to study his work), and a few others. The banality of much of the work here is a consequence of the tautological character of the photographed image, which is always the thing itself, unless, by virtue of some rare artistic inspiration, it bursts those bounds. That hardly ever happens. The overall impression one gets from the book is that we are looking at photographs whose ethos comes straight from the commercial and advertising world. The idea is to produce attractive images instantaneously, images that will be identified as "beautiful" by what Baudelaire calls "the mob."

Mass appeal

That explains the glut of visual cliches in this book perfectly. The masses in Baudelaire's time, as in our own day, identify "My heart / is blue" as an expression of emotion because it is ready for consumption and immediately identifiable as "emotion." A radio station like Galgalatz, for example, has built its whole musical repertoire around this kind of mass appeal.

In general (of course, we are sinning against some of the works), we are looking at the work of jaded photographers who take the photographic image for granted and have lost the ability to see the world though fresh eyes. They have the language of photography down pat. Along with their audience, they view the world through the filter of shopworn images, primarily in the context of consumer culture.

This is where the problem lies: Photographs of a grilled chicken steak or a cell phone are meant to portray the products as "more desirable" than they really are. The phone looks more "technological" than it really is - it becomes a "space ship." The frozen steak, warmed up in the microwave, is supposed to look like a culinary masterpiece (the purpose of the grill marks is to make the consumer forget that he is looking at a reheated product).

Think about the difference between the photographs mounted over the counter at McDonald's and the product you are being sold. We know we will get something that does not resemble the photo, but we are sucked in, again and again, because the image is so powerful. It is powerful because it is so overused, because it repeats itself. We are accustomed to substituting it for reality. The advertising image is an agent whose job is to falsely beautify and pump up real life.

The artistic image, on the other hand, is meant to penetrate some moment in reality and strip it bare (what Roland Barthes calls "punctum"), and this is passed on to the viewer. A good photograph is one that strips way the padding and exposes the truth, mainly in the sense of being struck by the surprising and simple realization that "yes, that's actually the way it is."

Too many of the photographers in this album photograph people and nature as if they were consumer goods - that is, from an image-related perception, rather than from a search for the truth. In doing so, they portray what philosopher Guy Debord describes in his book "The Society of the Spectacle" as a conglomeration of images "detached from every aspect of life." These are images that represent images - not something called "life."

Dror Burstein's novel "The Murderers" was published by Babel Books (in Hebrew).