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Government? Neighborhood!
By Amit Yulzari,
Nino (Chananya) Herman was a government photographer who went from cocktail party to cocktail party with Shimon Peres, hopped aboard Begin's helicopter to Cairo , and visited George Bush Sr. in his private home. Then came a series of trying events which culminated in his son's death in a car accident. Herman, who decided to look inward, took to the streets to document "magical, human moments" in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentine, and display those photographs in an ice cream parlor. As far as possible from the Prime Minister's Office, as sweet as possible, and as real.
It is the day after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October, 1981, and all of Egypt is in chaos. A total curfew has been declared in the streets of Cairo , and a grave sense of uncertainty pervades every corner. Former prime minister Menachem Begin, Sadat's partner in a historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel , is also in turmoil, and a high-ranking entourage, with Begin at the helm, quickly organizes to attend the funeral. Government Press Office photographer Nino Herman is a member of this delegation, and is as yet unaware that the seminal moment in his enduring photography career is closer at hand than ever.
"As soon as we landed in Cairo , they told us that we would first visit the widow's home to express our condolences, and I asked myself what I could do there," he recalls. "We arrived in the family home, entered a closed yard, and, from there, were led into a dark, shuttered room where the widow, Jihan Sadat, was locked up, in anguish and wearing black. Begin immediately sat next to her and comforted her without any physical contact, but with tremendous emotional proximity."
Uncertain as to how he should proceed in this sensitive status, Herman consulted the military attaché, who advised him that, as the photographer, he was free to decide.
"I started photographing and every flash lit up the dark room," Herman remembers. "The picture of Begin and Jihan depicts the humanity of a leader, typically relied upon to be a highly-exposed figure but privy to many moments which are not exposed to public scrutiny, and despite the enormous burden that he shoulders, he displays compassion."
What made this a seminal moment for Herman was not that the picture appeared in countless newspapers in Israel and abroad, but his exposure to another, gentler, and more wounded aspect of Begin's conduct. Herman's drive for the distilled human core of his photographic subjects became, from that moment, a way of life. From the beginning of his career in the late 60s, Herman preferred the small, human moments. While older, more seasoned photographers flooded newspaper desks with pictures of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, he chose to focus on Arab farmers in the Galilee hanging tobacco to dry.
"I physically took the pictures from one newspaper to another until they bought them from me," he recalls. "Finally, after a year like that, I got the longed-for press pass." That was no small feat for young Herman, who has suffered all his life from the limits to his movement imposed by polio. At an early age, he realized that he would not enlist in the army like everyone else. He considered photography to be his ticket to the engaging heights which he strove to achieve. In the mid-70s, he was hired by Ma'ariv newspaper to work as a news and magazine photographer. After his bid for a raise was rejected, he left the paper to establish, with photographer Eli Hershkowitz, the Zoom 77 photo agency.
"We were lucky and, thanks to all the peace initiatives during that period, David Rubinger [the Israel Prize winning photographer who shot the iconic image of crying photographers in the Six-Day War], offered us work at Time magazine, where he was on the board."
Herman's lens was not apathetic. "The pictures may have not been very interesting, but there was a feeling of history in the making in the air," he says. "In those days, leaders were perceived as the type who would change history in the most profound sense of the word, and only after time did I realize that the major changes wouldn't come from there."
During those days, Herman learned to overcome his physical limitations by means of enhanced preliminary observation of the situation at hand and early identification of the action which was about to take place. Thus he captured the moment which became one of his signature pictures, a kiss between Yitzhak Rabin and his wife, Leah, upon the prime minister's return from the United States .
"Alienation and connection live together in that picture," Herman proudly explains, "created in the gap between the passionate kiss and the prime minister's hands held at his sides."
In April, 1979, Herman was employed by the Government Press Office and, on his first day at work, sent to Egypt to document Begin's historic visit to Cairo ("You feel launched on the wings of history; your name appears on the prime minister's agenda, you’re a guest in splendid palaces; you fly in helicopters and look down on reality from above").
But despite a burgeoning career and convenient proximity to the inner circles of government, Herman decided to take a year-long leave-of-absence in the early 80s to take part in a daring, pioneering adventure. Along with a group of friends and in a breathtaking landscape, he established the community of Nataf in the Judean Hills, where he lives with his wife, Tehiya, to this day.
The beginning was hard. Even before taking hold of the land and completing a protracted legal battle regarding the status of Arabs who inhabited the 300 dunams of land on which the community was slated to be built, media mounted an attack. "Lawbreakers Bent on Getting Rich," headlines screamed. But Nataf's founders managed to circumvent these pitfalls and realize their vision. After a year of hard labor, Herman returned to the world of government photography, dividing his life between the virgin dirt paths of the nascent community and the necktie-clad halls of government in Jerusalem .
My affair with Shimon
Herman, 58, spent years among Israel 's movers and shakers. He immortalized Begin ("A very theatrical man – he liked the camera and his style and mannerisms were fascinating"); documented Yitzhak Shamir ("He acted more like an underground head of the Mossad than a prime minister"); but his real professional, mid-80s affair with Shimon Peres flourished in a period which Herman defines as "my Golden Age."
What did you think of Peres then?
"He was an intellectual and a major man-of-the-world who was interested in culture and history. During his trips abroad, he always insisted on going to bookstores."
What frame from that picture do you remember the best?
"I remember a military exercise in which Peres was present as the prime minister. I noticed him walk toward one of the helicopters and hug the pilot. They told me that was his son, Chemi, and I was very surprised. I didn't know that Peres' son was a pilot because he didn't exploit that at all despite attempts to de-legitimize him. I shot them together in that small moment and was glad I had the chance to depict Peres' human side, because there often exists a gap within him between the warm person that he is and the cold image that comes out."
A special, personal relationship developed between the two men, and Herman continued to accompany Peres after the Labor Party's demise in 1988 elections, during Peres' terms as finance and foreign minister. A few years later, he returned to Ma'ariv, first serving as photo editor on the news desk, and to the bloody reality of late-90s terror attacks. Faced with grim images of dismembered bodies and charged with the task of sorting through them, Herman felt a growing sense of professional burn-out.
In 1996, he first met Ronit Galapo, a spiritual teacher who focuses on what she calls "breaking through paths of awareness and revealing a hidden system of laws which directs the human space but is not accessible to human recognition," who was destined to be a major influence on the path that he took. About two years later, during the height of a process which shaped his personal development, Herman fell badly and broke his leg.
"As a photographer, I remember several falls, including one in George Bush Sr.'s private home, when I slipped on the stairs next to the President and Peres, and the bodyguards caught me in midair," he recalls. "But that fall was the hardest and most painful of all. I had an operation, spent a few months in a wheelchair, and mainly started listening to myself in a different way."
To facilitate rehabilitation from the injury, Herman took a leave-of-absence from the newspaper, from which he never returned. Moreover, after 30 years, he decided to set aside his camera and stopped shooting pictures for a decade.
"I chose to be attentive to the symbolic plane in which a fall symbolizes cessation, and breaking a leg [regel in Hebrew] means changing habits [hergelim in Hebrew, from the same root]," he explains. "I sat on the wheelchair and began to search my own soul."
In the context of that process of soul-searching, Herman felt that he had come to the end of the period of observing others, and sought to devote his time to looking inward. "I noticed how much noise and distraction there was in my world, for all the running after stories and people," he says. "Ronit helped me to express this feeling in words, by reminding me of the language of the simple heart, which joins the authentic wish to the space of life, and in so doing, it fully comes to pass."
Meanwhile, while trying to stake out a new career path far from the tragedies of others, his life was thrown into turmoil: In 2000, his son, Yair Herman, then just 20 years old, was killed in an automobile accident in Nataf. The son was a young director of video clips, including the clip of the song "Od Hozer Hanigun" by Berry Sakharov, who visited the family home in the wake of the tragedy.
"Berry began coming to us at home in Nataf every two weeks, and we found ourselves sitting on the porch and talking for hours about life and about ourselves," Herman relates. "Later on, we began organizing a jam session in our house, with all sorts of musicians and groups. A few years ago, I met a young musician named Nechama Goldstein, who was working on a debut album. I told her of a poem that I had written to Yair, and she set the words to music wonderfully. I had a dream that Berry would sing to Yair, and he agreed immediately, in that amazing way of his, and recorded the song along with Nechama."
Florentine My Love
His son's untimely death powerfully drew Herman to the world of the young. Tel Aviv called to him. In particular, the sooty Florentine neighborhood in the south of the city, which also caused him to take up anew the camera which had been neglected for the past 10 years. He began looking again, documenting everyday moments in the experience of the neighborhood's young people, photographing what he calls "essences of life, radiant in their one-off beauty."
What was it in Florentine that so attracted you?
"I experienced a simple and different energy there, of openness and acceptance of me as a photographer on the part of the residents, and, in general, among them and between them. In addition, I began a blog which I make sure to update frequently, on which I post pictures and text on the goings-on in the neighborhood, and which functions as a kind of running serial."
While falling in love with Florentine, Herman continued formulating his new creed. "I believe that everything that we go through in life is necessary. I can even say that now about the death of my son. There is something greater here than I am capable of understanding, and therefore I have no room for complaints like 'Why did this happen to me?' or 'I got screwed.' I understood that death strengthens only that which existed within us from the beginning, and therefore it's very important to dare to look inward, and to weigh what, exactly, exists there. Only when you move on from struggle and judgmentalism, and bring on the place of the heart with simplicity, is it also possible to move on from beliefs that hold you back. Only then is there a chance for something different to happen in the world."
Something different is indeed happening in Herman's world. Over the past year, he has taken care to come to Florentine nearly every day, parking his car on one of his favorite streets, and wandering around on them on foot, in order to capture neighborhood "magic moments." On one of those days, he printed on canvas a picture that he especially loved, and showed it to an employee of the nearby Anita ice cream parlor. The owner of the place was impressed, and invited Herman to mount an exhibition of his photographs in the ice cream parlor's space.
"At first, I wasn't convinced that I was going to go for this, since I'd wanted to show in a gallery," he says. "But in the end I understood that this was the right thing to do, because only in this way is correspondence with the street made possible, and joining together with the neighborhood's people, for whom this exhibition is an homage." Along with his wife, whose background is in the art world, and his friend, veteran photographer Joel Kantor, Herman constructed a concept and chose pictures for the exhibition. "I've lived in the neighborhood for six years, and I'd never seen the beauty in it, until I looked at these pictures," one of the visitors said this week.
The exhibition is still on display in the ice cream parlor, and is open to the public every day until in the morning. But Herman is already thinking about the next neighborhood project: documenting musicians. "Yair Dalal told me that Florentine is a musical superpower, but that it hasn't yet had the Mordechai Vanunu who will tell everyone about it," Herman explains. "I have learned that if you imagine your true desire, declare it, and begin to take steps toward it, it will also come true. From that standpoint, my renewed return to photography after a 10 year hiatus, is knowing the desire. I experienced that there was less joy in my heart, and I found it in a different place, such that it taught me to live my desire."
Ironic. "The wings of history" which you described earlier led you to a non-routine path – from prime ministers' cocktail parties, to the filthy streets of south Tel Aviv.
"Look, in those days I flew the skies with Peres in a world which was, in theory, all mine, and it's fair to assume that I would not have understood what the connection was to photographing everyday moments of simple people. On the other hand, then I began photographing on the street, so this is also a kind of a closing of a circle for me. Only, now I am coming to this meeting from a place of greater maturity. Then, I hadn't yet seen the world, and hadn't been a guest in splendid palaces, and now, I am in touch with the simple person within me, and the simple person who stands before me."
'Florentin – Moments of Everyone' 2009
This exhibition displays a selection of photographs by Nino (Hanania) Herman – the fruit of a process in which he went from being a photojournalist to a photographer whose sphere of interest is touching people – all people.
Nino served as news photographer of Israel's prime ministers from 1979 until 1986, and later as Shimon Peres' personal photographer. He was photo editor for the Maariv newspaper news desk until 1998. He then decided to make a change in his life, and to direct his lens toward looking inward.
Over the course of a decade, this act of observation gave rise to photography from a different place.
This time, his heart turned to meeting people in trust, empathy and desire to touch the human moments which together make up everyone's lives. Not necessarily high points and newsworthy drama, but everyday moments on the street's of Tel Aviv's Florentin neighborhood, distillations of life, glowing and gorgeous, unrepeatable.
Nino succeeds in conveying simplicity in his photographs, while at the same time bringing forth cultural echoes suggesting cinema, magical moments, and subjects shrouded in secrecy. His photographs capture complex situations with precision, reflecting the inner world of the photographer as well as that of his subjects.
In Nino's creed, when one moves away from struggle and judgmentalism, bringing forth in simplicity the place of the heart, there is a chance that something different will take place in the world. In this spirit, Nino seeks to tell of beauty, of what there is to see and to cause to be seen.
Tehiya Herman,
Curator of the Exhibit
Shabbat, 26 July, 2014
If, every time someone attacked another person, shooting a
missile of anger, rage, and frustration, a red word-balloon lit up declaring
“warning”!...
A photo from an article in the “Days and Nights” section of the
newspaper “Maariv”. Nino worked with
Yigal Lev on an story about gunners in the 1970s.
“I don’t know what you say since I’ve already said it all on
the phone; what do I have to add? Maybe
this is just something for me to give them so they’ll have something to hold on
to. It’s important that you know that
I’m happy that I was born into this family., I’m happy that I was drafted into
the Golani brigade, and I did everything the best I could. If you’re reading this, it’s a sign my career
is over, but at least I fought with honor and I’m happy. Be assured I am happy. It’s important that you know this.” (The last words of Captain Daniel Pomerantz,
Z”L, from his mother’s eulogy at his funeral today).
I copied this heart-rending quote from a friend on
Facebook. I myself wasn’t able to listen
to the bereaved mother who read it; I wasn’t able to hold back the sob bursting
forth that seized me.
These are very sad, complex days. The voices and sights are
unbearable. As parents who lost a dear
son, who was killed in traffic accident during his army service, we were
required to choose which path in life we would continue on. We chose to open our hearts to love. These aren’t just pretty words, this was a
profound, brave choice to listen to the heart, to agree - facing wider, complicated, personal realities -- to bring a bared, open heart. In these days of pain and suffering,
everything takes on an extreme quality.
I hope and wish that this war will end quickly. At the same time, the internal struggle,
which each and every one of us experiences, is all the more forcefully exposed,
between the violent, emotional voices, a reaction of some defense mechanism, which
puts us on the attack, and the quiet hidden place, which can hardly be found in
our existence these days, which knows attention, knows human respect, knows the
sanctity of life, which doesn’t struggle, as though it were in the eye of the
storm.
Along with the unbearable experience, I know that everything
in human existence has a function. And
as a result I don’t rush to react, to strike, to defend; but rather simply hold
inside the unbearable helplessness, behind which is always found a door to a
new direction, without our knowing clearly what.
It occurred to me that what is needed now more
than anything is to deal with the gratuitous hatred (sinat hinam) on the
social networks, in speech, the media, in the government, which is corroding
every good part of the essence of our lives.
I imagined that every time a person voices some slander, a word-balloon
would rise over his speech, with Warning!!, Warning!!! – that is to say, the
same call that is part of our lives today [i.e., whenever there’s a missile
alert] will continue to accompany us after it’s http://issuu.com/44degrees/docs/44degrees5-2014/48 |