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Past time By Dalia Karpel Tags: Zionism, Photography At age 62, photographer Zoltan Kluger packed up his things and headed for New York. It was 1958 and Kluger, a Zionist propagandist, was having trouble finding work in the young state of Israel. His wife Sarah threatened to kill herself if they didn't follow their only son, whom they hadn't seen in eight years, to the United States. Kluger sold his third-floor, key-money apartment on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and left behind about 50,000 negatives. Then just about all traces of him were lost - at least until two years ago. That was when research began in preparation for the solo exhibition called "Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958," which recently opened at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. For 25 years, with tremendous intensity, depth and breadth, Kluger, who died in 1977, documented the Zionist project and the "state in the making." His images, which grace nearly every history book dealing with the history of Mandatory Palestine, are deeply imprinted in the collective Israeli memory. Their heroes are the new Jews, the pioneers, the kibbutzniks, the city dwellers, the laborers in construction and agriculture, the fighters in the pre-state Haganah and Palmach forces, the athletes. Immigrants and sabras (native-born Israelis) alike. His employers were Keren Hayesod (United Israel Appeal) and the Jewish National Fund. A large portion of Kluger's 50,000 negatives became national property and were preserved in various archives in Israel. Some 4,000 of them are displayed on the Web site of the Israel Government Press Office, and they can also be found today in public archives such as the Keren Hayesod collection in the Central Zionist Archive, the JNF Archive, the State Archive and the Israel Defense Forces Archive. The exhibition, which was curated by Dr. Ruth Oren of the University of Haifa, and by artist and curator Guy Raz, contains 300 selected photos. The curators spent a lot of time going through all the archives, and even came up with a single portrait of the man himself. Advertisement Although practically every Israeli has been exposed at some point to Kluger's photographs, whether in books or at different historical exhibitions, this is the first comprehensive solo show devoted to his work. It is divided into sections that fit the historic Eretz Israel narrative: air and flight, security and defense, agriculture and industry, urban and rural settlement, public events, 1948, sport and dance, aliyah (immigration) and absorption. Both heroic and aesthetic, the photos were often shot from unconventional angles and reflect total dedication to the Zionist idea and what was then the new Jewish-Israeli nationalism. Take, for example, a picture taken a few days after the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947. It shows a young teacher in a festive dress writing the two words "medina ivrit" ("Hebrew state") in chalk on the blackboard, alongside a map of the UN's partition plan. "Kluger's photographs are the work of someone with a sympathetic, direct and precise gaze, though he often does not hesitate to stage the subjects in order to produce a successful image," Oren and Raz write in the catalog. "It's also the gaze of a curious and ambitious artist, who is searching for and sees before him fascinating visual models. The cultural milieu in which he operated was that of international modernism, which presented industrial development, urban development and the aesthetics of the machine as ideals of progress, not only in the local Zionist context." Zoltan Kluger as born in Hungary in the winter of 1896. He was a contemporary of other renowned Hungarian-Jewish photographers, such as Martin Munkacsi, Andre Kertesz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Brassai. The latter fought in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, while Kluger served as a flight photographer in the air force and was awarded several medals. In the late 1920s, he arrived in Berlin and worked as a freelance press photographer. In Germany at the time, the genre of "photo reportage" (a photographic essay accompanied by text) was just becoming popular, and Kluger brought it to Eretz Israel in 1946, as the first photographer of the Dvar Hashavua newspaper. Raz located photos by Kluger from the four years he worked in Berlin, and these are being shown for the first time in the exhibition. In Berlin, Kluger met the photographer Nahman Shifrin, owner of one of Germany's largest press agencies, Press-Foto. After the Nazis came to power, German newspapers were prohibited from ordering photos from either of them. Shifrin was the one who realized that Palestine-Eretz Israel would be their haven. He approached Leo Hermann, the general secretary of the Keren Hayesod, and suggested the establishment of a journalistic photography agency in Eretz Israel with the aim of disseminating the Zionist idea throughout the world. "Has the world press ever seen a slice of life from the kibbutzim?" Shifrin wrote Hermann, before leaving Germany. "Has it seen the toil of the Jewish farmer from morning till night? What does the world know of the heroism of men and women pioneers?" Kluger arrived in Palestine first, as a tourist, in October 1933. He did not have an immigration certificate, but immediately began working and photographed the opening of the Haifa port, Arab demonstrations in Jaffa against Jewish immigration, and immigrants from Germany on the deck of a ship. In November of that year, Shifrin joined him, and the two founded Hahevra Hamizrahit Bishvil Ha'itonut (The Oriental Press Company), with which Kluger was affiliated until he left the country in 1958. Shifrin's first professional connection was with Keren Hayesod, and later with the JNF, which helped him to obtain a permit to stay in the country. In February 1934, Kluger, who had been living alone in the company's offices, also submitted a request for such a permit, and he received one a few months later, thanks to the intervention of Moshe Sharett, who later became Israel's second prime minister. The company flourished. Shifrin managed the place, produced and distributed the photographs, served as the driver and wrote the captions. Kluger took more and more pictures. From 1937 onward, the office was located in the basement of the building at 97-99 Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Kluger, who had since married, lived with his wife Sarah and their son on the third floor. His images were made into photo-montages and displayed in important propagandistic and documentary exhibitions, as well as in artistic exhibitions in the country, and also in Paris and New York. The Tel Aviv Museum also showed some of his works in 1943 and 1948. Oriental Press collaborated with the Palphot postcard company on the "We Are Building Eretz Israel" series in 1934, and subsequently on a series of postcards focusing on the second Maccabiah Games. By then, Kluger was signing his work with his Hebrew name: Zvi. The work was commissioned by the photography departments of the JNF and Keren Hayesod. Every economic enterprise, every festive event, every founding of a new settlement was recorded by photographers who were dispatched by these two institutions, which also gave them helpful advice (e.g., "On Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek, consult with the members about how to take unstaged pictures of work and of guard duty"). In March 1938, the founding of Kibbutz Hanita was covered by several still photographers, including Kluger, as well as video photographers. That year, Kluger joined photographer Fred Dunkel on two filming expeditions in the spirit of the time, and the results can be seen in two films being screened at the exhibition. Among his projects were also a majority of the photos used in the Mishmar Ve'sport album published by the Dubek company in the early 1940s. The album comprised three sections - guarding, sport and conquest of the land - and had room allotted for 216 pictures, which people were supposed to place in themselves and could be found inside packs of the company's cigarettes. However, behind all the photos with optimistic themes, there were problems. In their article, Raz and Oren reveal Kluger's uneasy relationship with the Zionist institutions in 1937, during the time of the Arab Revolt. The institutions had not paid and even threatened to stop working with Kluger and Shifrin, after their request was rejected to be given the negatives in addition to the photographs themselves. The outstanding payment, incidentally, was only two Palestine pounds for eight negatives and eight copies. Kluger's despair continued to grow. "I'm suffocating," he was quoted as saying. "I'll die. I'm not progressing. I'm lagging behind other photographers in the world. The pioneers here are dying from fever, living in poverty, tired and gloomy, and I'm supposed to always photograph them laughing. I'm tired of taking photographs of laughing pioneers." So said Shifrin about him in an interview with Shlomo Shaba in his comprehensive article on Kluger (Dvar Hashavua, June 1970) - the only article about him in the archives. Kluger also gained an impressive reputation thanks to his aerial photos. In the spring of 1937, the wealthy publisher Salman Schocken, owner of Haaretz, was behind a production in which Kluger took 250 aerial photos from specially rented Palestine Airlines planes. Keren Hayesod wanted to keep the first distribution rights to the photographs to itself, and in 1938, the images were included in elegant albums like one produced by Schocken on the occasion of his 60th birthday to give out to guests and well-wishers. Similar productions of aerial views of the country were undertaken by Kluger in subsequent years, up until April 1947. In the interview with Shaba, Shifrin also said: "The airplanes were small, without any set-up for taking photographs. Kluger would stick a substantial part of his body outside the plane in order to take the best picture and asked the pilot to perform acrobatic moves that he was afraid to do." Kluger and the Oriental Press did not toil solely on behalf of the Zionist enterprise. He also documented the hardships of life for new immigrants in the transit camps, and in the Arab villages in the late 1940s, and contrasted this with the thriving lifestyle in Tel Aviv. Besides his work for the newspaper, in the early 1950s, he published a book called "Eleh pnei yisrael" ("This is the Face of Israel"), with text by the writer Moshe Shamir. But, still, he did not have that much work. Leo Hermann, the general secretary of Keren Hayesod and the person who maintained the professional connection with Kluger, died in 1951. Three years later, Kluger wrote a restrained letter to the director of Keren Hayesod's photography archive, expressing his regret about his difficult situation. Curators Oren and Raz maintain that when the important exhibition "The Family of Man" (curated by Edward Steichen of New York's Museum of Modern Art) arrived in Israel in 1957, Kluger felt almost certain that, had his circumstances been different, his professional work could have been included in it. When Israel celebrated its first decade of independence, the Oriental Press ceased operating according to its original formula. Paul Gross, who had immigrated to Israel from Romania in 1950, became the company photographer after buying Kluger out. Due to changes in the market, Gross and Shifrin began producing mostly PR photographs for institutions and businesses. Gross is now 91 and resides in an assisted-living facility. Last week, he talked about how sorry Kluger was to leave Israel in 1958. "Zoltan was a big patriot and it was hard for him to go to the United States, even for a vacation. They left because of pressure from his wife, who said she'd kill herself if she didn't get to see their son again. The son had been sent to the U.S. by the IDF in the early 1950s to do a technical course for the air force, and then he disappeared. I suspect that his mother was in contact with him through letters. Zoltan and his wife traveled to meet their son but never managed to see him because the son avoided them. It was hard for Kluger to deal with the fact that his son was considered a deserter." What happened in New York? Gross: "They didn't meet the son. From a personal standpoint, this was a tragedy. At first, the Klugers received a little help from Sarah's family in New York, but she soon became ill and died. Her family told him that he had to stand on his own two feet, but it wasn't that easy in those days. He had large debts. Another person would have become depressed, but Kluger was an optimist by nature. He opened a photography shop and began covering his debts thanks to an original idea he had: offering free photography lessons to anyone who bought equipment and materials in his shop. Somehow, he managed to keep his head above water. "After Sarah died, he wanted to return to Israel, but Shifrin explained to him that photography in Israel had changed and that he would get lost among all the young people. Financially, there was nothing for him to look for in Israel, Shifrin told him. And Kluger also suffered from the stigma left by his son, the deserter. Kluger's last great love was for his dachshund, and when the dog died, Zoltan was very upset. I liked him. He was a man with a talent for life and a strong desire to survive." Raz traveled to New York, following in Kluger's footsteps, and found that he'd earned his livelihood largely from photographing weddings and other events. He embarked on the trip after having discovered a photo of a dancer in the home of a photography collector. Raz turned over the photo and discovered that it was stamped with the address of Kluger's shop: 245 E. 80th Street (between Second and Third Avenues). Before going to the address, Raz visited the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, and in the genealogical section was able to locate Kluger's date of death: May 16, 1977 (he was 81). At the photographer's apartment building, he met the long-time doorman, who remembered Kluger as tall, quiet, modest and generous. He also showed Raz where the photo shop had been, in the same building. "Kluger is known as 'the nation's photographer,' but he was more than that," the curator explains. "He's the modernist photographer of the new Jew. Not only did he come from the cradle of photographic culture, in Hungary, he was also influenced by German and Russian photography. In my opinion, he was the heir to Avraham Suskin, who stopped photographing in 1933." Raz and Oren are proud that for the first time, it is possible to show what Kluger looked like: "As recently as two months ago, we still didn't know how we'd find the photograph of him that was printed in Shaba's article in Dvar Hashavua," they said. The elderly Gross sounded skeptical, but wanted to be polite. He's not entirely certain that the man in the photograph is indeed Kluger. Apparently, we'll never know. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Knowing when to fold Ehud Olmert tells Kadima to begin preparations for party primaries. Cost of kashrut Meat prices set to soar after raid on biggest kosher slaughterhouse in U.S.

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