Boris Carmi

Boris Carmi (born January 1, 1914 in Moscow / Russian Empire as Boris Winograd, † September 18, 2002 in Tel Aviv / Israel ) was a Russian - Israeli photographer . He is considered one of the pioneers of Israeli photojournalism, who documented the emergence of the State of Israel from the very beginning.

Life

In 1930, at the age of sixteen, Carmi left Moscow to go to Paris via detours through Poland, Germany and Italy . There he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne and began taking photos at the same time. In 1939 he went to Danzig to enter Palestine . However, he did not receive permission to do so until three years later, so that he immigrated in a freighter in 1939. Before he could turn his photographic interest into his profession, he made his way as a warehouse worker and fruit picker for a few years.

During the war he served in the British Army, a. a. also in Italy and Egypt, where he worked as an aerial photographer and in cartography.

As the first photographer for the Israeli army newspaper BeMahaneh, he documented the War of Independence with impressive pictures in 1948 and thus acted as a chronicler of contemporary history. As one of the few active photographers of this time, he captured the historically important moments, the time of construction, the waves of immigration and the conflicts of those decades for posterity. With his unpretentious style, he shaped the visual image of the early days of the State of Israel, which became known all over the world.

Carmi, as he called himself in Hebrew since 1949, worked for various newspapers and magazines, provided reports on the immigrants and their new beginnings, but also striking portraits of artists and politicians. In the years 1952-1976 he was mainly in the chief editor of a daily newspaper and a leader in the Israeli Press Association. Again and again he documented the everyday life of the State of Israel with all its peculiarities and adversities in quiet, sometimes touching pictures, but from 1960 also brought reports from abroad.

Carmi remained true to photojournalism all his life and continued to take photos until shortly before his death.

Work and appreciation

Although Carmi dealt with photography at an early age, he was still self-taught and taught himself everything. For six decades he recorded the founding and development of the State of Israel for the print media with his own eye, which puts people first. He was never interested in the sensational picture or in action, his quiet, never intrusive pictures make him one of the greats among photojournalists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson , Werner Bischof or W. Eugene Smith - which has been wrongly almost forgotten . His portraits reflect the attitude towards life of the people at the time of immigration and reconstruction, which was characterized by uprooting and a new beginning, by the will to build up, striving for normality, but also by fear of the future and cultural integration problems.

He often made his reports in the reception and transit camps, where Jews from the most diverse cultures arrived and stopped together between suitcases, boxes and tents, regardless of whether they came from Moscow, Berlin or Marrakech.

Today, for example, the image of the war against Egypt in 1956 , as Carmi has captured, has a style-defining and all the more haunting effect : instead of choosing fighting, injured or destruction as a motif, in the hard shadow of the deserted Sinai desert he only shows the abandoned, worn-out army boots of a refugee Egyptian soldiers.

How strange some immigrants may have felt at first can be seen tangibly in his portrait of a gaunt farmer who sits like a foreign body in the barren room of a still empty small apartment in the kibbutz, in which only the richly decorated, hand-carved pendulum clock on the bare wall and a barely decorated one wooden farmer's table remind of his southern German origins, which he seems to long for.

The conflict-ridden time of the founding of the state is vividly condensed in a picture that only superficially shows a smiling young man who appears to be waiting for someone at a street sign: next to his knee, he is half-hidden, holding a machine gun at hand, while the one in Hebrew, Arabic and street sign painted in Latin characters not only to Be'er Scheva and Nahal Oz, but also briefly but martially in English to "Frontier, Danger! 2.6 km" ("Border, Danger!") - a break in the idyll that through the close observation of Carmi is particularly expressed.

Exhibitions and publications

In 1959 Carmi had his first solo exhibition in Tel Aviv, where he lived for a long time. In the following decades, in addition to the day-to-day business, not only other exhibitions but also book publications follow, e.g. B. a series on Israeli landscapes, a volume with portraits and a children's book "The wonderful journey of the flamingos".

He has received awards for his life's work from both the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem .

Carmi's work, which comprises around 60,000 negatives , is well known in Israel, but has hardly been processed for international reception in terms of journalism or art history. It was only after his death in Berlin in 2004 (Akademie der Künste) and in Frankfurt am Main in 2005 (Jewish Museum) that the best of his pictures were made available to the public outside of Israel for the first time in a solo exhibition. Under the patronage of the former Federal President Johannes Rau and the Israeli President Moshe Katzav , well over a hundred pictures from his oeuvre were shown, whose remarkable quality and expressiveness make him appear as a great one in the history of photography.

literature

• Alexandra Nocke (Ed.): Boris Carmi - Photographs from Israel , Munich, New York 2004, ISBN 3-7913-2933-2 (bilingual English - German)

Web links

• Photos from the 2004 exhibition
• About Carmi at Israeli-Art