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 Postcards from the Zionist edge
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at Haaretz.com
As an old man, photographer Ya'acov Ben-Dov shut himself up in his ground-floor home in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood - that was where he kept his old negatives - and relived the events he had recorded with his camera: the founding of a kibbutz; a cornerstone-laying ceremony for a university; the first president of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, in shorts, riding an ass at Wadi Ein Farah; the second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Boris Schatz at the Tombs of the Kings in Jerusalem - he captured them all, over a span of several decades.
Ben-Dov's pictures reached the entire Jewish world. Some of them will be on display, nearly 40 years after his death, at Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov Meuhad, through the end of July. The exhibition features 200 postcard and 70 photographs, some of them printed by Ben-Dov himself, as well as films that he made in the 1920s. Visitors will be able to view the films at two different viewing stations.
Most of the photographs are from the large postcard collection of Dr. Yermiyahu Rimon, while others are from the collection of architect Avia Hashimshoni.
Ben-Dov, who was born in Poland, was a pioneer among Zionist photographers, and the first to make silent movies in Israel. He immigrated in 1907 as a young man, and founded the photography department at Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (now Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design). He helped to shape the aesthetics of Zionist photography, in the days when propaganda was a good thing. Great effort was expended in trying to convince Ben-Dov that his photographs were irreplaceable and should be preserved in a national archive. The work paid off when he eventually agreed to sell most of his collection to the Central Zionist Archives (CZA).
The curator of the exhibition, Yaakov Gross, notes that Ben-Dov was not the first movie photographer in Israel. He was preceded by the Lumiere brothers in 1896, by a photographer from Thomas Edison's studios in 1903, and by Murray Rosenberg in 1911. But according to Gross, Ben-Dov was the first to create a Jewish film studio in Jerusalem, and to make movies continually over a 15-year period that began in 1917. Ben-Dov's numerous letters - which are part of the CZA's propaganda collection - show that photography for him was above all a work of documentation.
Gross relates that when Ben-Dov first arrived in Palestine, he worked as a watchman in the orchards of Rehovot, and made sure there were photographs of himself with his rifle standing in front of the groves. That was one of the strongest images of that era, "the new Jew" with the power of deterrence.
Ben-Dov recorded the development of the yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community, almost obsessively, with a wide lens that captured many details. In addition to documenting the Zionist enterprise in cities, kibbutzim and villages, he photographed most of the significant events of the period: General Allenby's entry into Jerusalem, the Zionist Commission, the Jewish Legion, the installation of High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, the visit of Winston Churchill, the 1929 Hebron massacre, and portraits of yishuv leaders in the early 20th century.
Ben-Dov produced about 800 postcards in all and brought out six albums under the name "Y. Ben Dov. Bezalel Jerusalem." Ben-Dov's first film was "Yehuda Hameshuchreret"/ "Judea Liberated" (1918). In 1930 he made the first short Hebrew feature, about the children's village at Givat Hamoreh.
Ben-Dov's darkroom was in the second story of the Finegold Houses, on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. From the first floor one could hear the sounds of the Ben-Dov daughters practicing piano. Prints were always made in the afternoon, when the sun, at an acute angle, came in through a specifically built hole in the shutters on the western wall of the apartment. There was no electricity, but sunlight was plentiful. All one needed was the knowledge of how to make use of it. Ben-Dov developed his film in a special tub and dried it on square wooden racks.
Ben-Dov died in 1968 at the age of 84. His daughter, the painter Hanna Ben-Dov - some of whose works are also on display at Ashdot Yaakov - transfered the remainder of her father's estate to the Israel Museum. Remnants of his films were collected in a number of archives around the world, and then restored at the Steven Spielberg Film Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Cinematheque.
"I didn't write or create fictional characters," Ben-Dov said in 1926. "I took life as it was, in a way that could not be denied, in a regular order, in an appropriate manner, and with the right expression."
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