One might plausibly argue that Reuven Milon was the Jerusalemite photographer. Part of the collateral for that declare is at the moment on the partitions of an exhibition space on the International Convention Center (ICC). There are, the truth is, 32 items of proof within the aptly and succinctly named Reuven Milon – A Jerusalemite Photographer assortment that proffer testomony to Jerusalem-born-and-bred Milon’s talent and expertise as a photographer and, extra to the purpose, his enduring love for his hometown.
Milon handed away in June 2023 on the age of 95. He was energetic and centered on his inventive and documentary work, sorting via his tens of 1000’s of prints and negatives at his residence in Beit Hakerem till only a few months earlier than he died. I met him at his condominium on a few events through the years and was all the time taken along with his genial strategy to others and life, and his devotion to his work.
A restricted retrospective of his expansive oeuvre opened final Friday on the ICC, curated by Eran Litvin, who was additionally answerable for his – albeit extra compact – displaying on the identical venue in March 2020. That was once I made Milon’s acquaintance and commenced to understand his insightful view of Jerusalem and his skill to see and seize locations and fleeting scenes – trivia of city life – with nice experience and consummate sensitivity. They are the sorts of nuances that solely somebody who lives and breathes a spot, and the subject material at hand, can discern, depict, after which convey to others eloquently and faithfully.
Litvin acquired in on the Milon act lengthy earlier than I did. “I met him virtually 20 years in the past on the Zionist Archives. I used to be a historic researcher for TV packages and films, and he was the contact for the archives. He additionally did scanning for them,” the curator remembers. “He advised me he additionally took pictures, and I requested to see a few of them.” Litvin was in for fairly a shock. “I visited him at his residence, and I used to be amazed. I’d thought he most likely used to exit to the town streets and take some photos. I found that Reuven was obsessive about Jerusalem.”
This wasn’t nearly snapping the highlights, chronicling the glittering and momentous occasions for the historical past books. Milon dug deep into the nitty-gritty underbelly of metropolis dynamics. “He photographed Jerusalem at its much less fairly occasions. He took photos of buildings being demolished and the brand new ones being constructed.” That smacks of a documentary strategy. “Yes, it was real historic documentation,” Litvin concurs. “I feel it’s extra about archival-historical pictures of a metropolis than inventive pictures. He took photos of a metropolis that appears utterly completely different as we speak.”
Besides the alluring aesthetic of the prints, it is usually a consolation to a few of us who bear in mind the Jerusalem of half a century or extra in the past. “Sometimes it’s even tough to establish the spot within the {photograph} [because it has changed so much],” Litvin notes.
But it wasn’t nearly recording locations which have lengthy dissipated into the mists of time. There was extra to Milon’s work than that. “There had been a number of photographers round in Jerusalem in these days, however I feel Reuven stood out for 2 causes. One, there was the documentary facet. The second factor was the human ingredient. He was all the time on the lookout for a human facet, whether or not it was a toddler, an outdated man, or perhaps an artisan or tradesman.”
A placing instance of Milon’s eye for standout human slivers of quotidian life round him is a pleasant shot of a freckled-faced boy in raptures over the ice cream cone he’s sinking his enamel into. I bear in mind Milon telling me he homed in on the teenager simply ready for the correct second to seize an expression of pure innocence that spoke volumes. “And take a look at it,” exclaims his daughter-in-law, Libby Milon. “He photographed the child with the phrase ‘artik’ [“popsicle”] on the wall subsequent to him. He all the time seemed for one thing additional, one thing contextual.”
These days, in a world awash with cellphone cameras, maybe such a body could be more durable to seize as a result of we’re way more conscious that somebody would possibly catch us in mid-flight, because it had been. Then once more, in Milon’s day, definitely in Jerusalem of 1953 when the boy was caught within the throes of candy ecstasy, anybody prowling the streets on the lookout for stuff to snap could be fairly noticeable as he lugged his – by as we speak’s hi-tech requirements – comparatively hefty tools round with him.
Milon’s mild mien and tackle life got here to the fore right here. “Anyone who met him remarked how modest and quiet he was,” says his son Ram, who now lives in Milon’s condominium, his personal childhood residence. Milon, by the way in which, however his penchant for his personal stomping floor, additionally roamed the remainder of the nation and locations a lot farther afield, digicam typically on the prepared.
Ram additionally pertinently notes that these had been completely different etiquette occasions. “He took photos throughout Israel and the world.
Observe after which {photograph}
He took photos of all types of craftsmen and tradesmen, beggars, peddlers, kids, and so forth. As far as I recall, he didn’t use to go as much as these folks and ask for his or her permission to take their image. He’d simply stand to the facet, observe them, and {photograph} them. Today, it isn’t so politically appropriate to do this. You need to ask them if it’s okay, in the event that they don’t thoughts.” Even with that in thoughts, contemplating Milon’s demeanor, it’s a truthful guess that if he had requested, few – if any in any respect – would have objected..
We won’t ever know for certain if Milon’s unwitting “sitters” over seven a long time of his documentary odyssey had any downside with being recorded, however the unfold on the ICC is all of the richer for his chutzpa and proclivity for urgent the shutter launch button as his well-oiled pictorial antennae locked in on one thing snapworthy.
His body of Milkman Singer, taken one early morning in 1959 within the higher reaches of Ben-Yehuda Street, exudes a way of downtown Jerusalem intimacy, the freshness of the unfolding day, and Milon’s fondness for what others would possibly deem to be “the extraordinary.” In this case, the topic is aware of the digicam lens is educated on him as he gazes, a bit of warily or, presumably, wearily, straight at Milon’s cigarette jutting out at a jaunty angle of his mouth. The milkman, in fetching workman’s apparel, is simply doing his rounds, as ordinary, about to set bottles on doorsteps. What may very well be extra prosaic than that? Yet, along with his expertise for discerning on a regular basis vignettes that will resonate, Milon has left us with deftly crafted snippets of a bygone period that provide some nostalgic consolation for anybody who remembers these days, and presumably suggests to others that life right here again in pre-digital occasions was very completely different and positively moved at a gentler tempo.
I questioned whether or not Milon hankered for his hometown of yesteryear, when folks appeared to have extra persistence, when there have been fewer “time-saving” digital and different units round. That comes throughout in a beautiful second frozen in time on a metropolis avenue as a buyer patiently waits for his pen to be restored to full operational order. The artisan sits at his makeshift sidewalk desk, placing a number of effort into his work beneath a small signal that reads “Expert within the Repair of Fountain Pens.” How many individuals underneath the age of fifty as we speak even know what a fountain pen is?
If I had been trying to eke out some Milon angst in regards to the gradual disappearance of the Jerusalem he knew as a boy through the British Mandate, and as a younger man, I used to be to be rebuffed. “I attempted to get him to inform me if he was unhappy over the way in which the town had modified, and the way so many issues he’d photographed now not existed,” Litvin feedback. “But I feel he favored it. He noticed it because the pure evolution of a metropolis. He did take a nostalgic view of issues, however he wasn’t offended. He accepted that new buildings needed to exchange the outdated ones. Then once more, he felt it was vital to protect among the older buildings at a time when nobody talked about conservation.”
Today, we find out about these demolished structural specters partly because of Milon’s unstinting reportage. “He photographed all types of phenomena which have now handed, such because the cinemas of Jerusalem, cafés, all types of historic buildings just like the Generali Building [which still stands at the corner of Jaffa and Shlomzion Hamalka strseet], and, after all, spiritual buildings like synagogues. That is essential.” That included the Mamilla buildings, which had been largely decreased to rubble mendacity in no-man’s land between West Jerusalem and the Jordanian-held Old City.
Despite hailing from a era that got here from a comparatively technologically primitive Israel, which, for instance, needed to wait a long time to look at TV, Milon moved with the occasions. On one of many events I visited him, he took me into the diminutive area close to the doorway to the condominium the place he labored a lot of his post-snapping magic. He proudly confirmed me a 3D digicam, and he readily embraced digital pictures.
For a few years, Milon developed his personal movies in a spacious laboratory on the basement stage of his constructing, and Ram has lovingly collated a few of Milon’s creating and different photographic equipment in a nook of the decrease stage of the now trendy condominium. The implement collage features a handbook mild publicity timer and varied different objects that may have been leading edge – or thereabouts – when Milon was producing his personal prints.
While Guy Raz, pictures curator on the Eretz Israel Museum (MUZA) in Ramat Aviv, doesn’t regard Milon as a bona fide member of the photographic elite on this nation, he appreciates his huge, variegated oeuvre. Part of that seems on the House of Photography web site (hope.eretzmuseum.org.il/about-photography-house) that Raz established underneath the MUZA aegis as a web-based repository for photographers and their work from this a part of the world over the past shut to 2 centuries. “I’d name Milon’s pictures a bit of naïve,” he says with no hint of damaging criticism. “He didn’t search for the drama. I feel that’s what is compelling about his work. It is like pictures from the times of innocence [of Jerusalem].”
That, Raz feels, is an extension of Milon’s character. “He was a delicate, good particular person. He didn’t search for alternatives to push himself into the limelight. Perhaps that was to his detriment as a result of he’s much less well-known,” Raz suggests.
Milon is, certainly, not talked about in the identical elevated breath because the likes of now 95-year-old Micha Bar-Am – who turned often known as the nationwide battle photographer following his daredevil protection of the Yom Kippur War – or David Rubinger, who famously snapped three Israeli paratroopers by the Western Wall instantly after its recapture within the Six Day War. Shimon Peres dubbed Rubinger “the photographer of the nation within the making”.
That mentioned, and as patently imparted proper throughout A Jerusalemite Photographer, Milon not solely had his finger on his digicam shutter launch button, however he additionally had it always, and sensitively, utilized to the heartbeat of life coursing via the town he liked.
Milon additionally had a delicate humorousness, and there are anecdotal slots within the exhibition, some with intriguing contextual worth, similar to a haredi boy nonchalantly exhaling cigarette smoke, presumably on Purim when one and all among the many ultra-Orthodox let their hair down, and one other haredi teenager peering via the legs of his kapota-clad elders, little doubt at some rabbinical pantheon member. Jerusalem within the snow, a bewitching movie noir-style print of Milon’s spouse, Rina, underneath a avenue lamp; the façade of the Zion Cinema within the metropolis heart displaying Gone with the Wind; and soccer followers dangling perilously astride the excessive perimeter fencing across the now long-gone legendary YMCA pitch then utilized by Betar Jerusalem spell out the expansive vary of life aspects Milon lovingly photographed and left for us to get pleasure from.
It should be mentioned that the spot assigned to Reuven Milon – A Jerusalemite Photographer is hardly a serious venue. And to get to the exhibition, you want to make a reservation through the ICC (iccjer.co.il/en/exhibitions/reuven-milon-a-jerusalemite-photographer). This is hardly Milon’s first exhibition – there have been 10 between 1954 and 2020 – nonetheless, one might need thought the municipality would make investments a modicum of effort in making Milon’s pursuit higher identified to the general public. Better nonetheless, how about an intensive retrospective on the Israel Museum? Perhaps when he has settled into his workplace chair, incoming Israel Museum director Jacob (Yasha) Grobman would possibly take into account it.
Litvin, for one, would assist such an initiative. “Reuven’s work is a real nationwide asset,” he says. While there are some 60,000 of Milon’s damaging scanned and safely ensconced on the Harvard University archives, there are mentioned to be a number of hundred thousand ready to be digitized and secured for posterity.
Reuven Milon – A Jerusalemite
Photographer closes on August 26.
For extra data:
milons.co.il/reuven/index_eng.htm