Archive of the German-Jewish photographer Kurt Meyerowitz, containing over 150,000 negatives. Jerusalem and various places in Israel, mid-1950s to 1980s (mostly from 1960s and 1970s).
Kurt Meyerowitz was born in 1906 in Gelsenkirchen in the region of Westphalia, Germany. He received his first camera as a bar-mitzvah gift, and since that moment did not cease photographing throughout his entire life, although he had never studied photography. With the Nazi rise to power he escaped to France, wandered between a number of cities and finally found his way to Switzerland, where he lived until the end of the war.
In 1945 he immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem, where he opened a photo lab called "Photo Emka", which became known as one of the leading, most professional photo labs in the city. Its clients included photographers Tim Gidal, Werner Braun, Alfred Bernheim and others. In those years Meyerowitz began to establish himself as an independent photographer, first in the service of photographic agencies and later for the JNF, the Knesset and the Foreign Ministry, the Youth Aliyah organization, Hadassah Hospital and other institutions.
The present archive contains documentation, extraordinary in its breadth, of various aspects of Israeli life in those years. Among other things, the collection includes:
* Thousands of negatives documenting the activities of the Israeli Knesset in the 1960s and 1970s, including negatives of David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Zalman Shazar, Ephraim Katzir, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and others.
* Thousands of negatives documenting the visits of statesmen and notables to Israel, including negatives showing the visit of Richard Nixon in 1974, Margaret Thatcher's visit in 1976, Henry Kissinger's visit, Teddy Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, and hundreds of ambassadors and other persons.
* Numerous negatives showing the Israeli youth village; the Hadassah Medical Center at Ein Kerem; the signing of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Egypt at the end of the Yom Kippur War; IDF forces on the western bank of the Suez Canal; the Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem's Geula neighborhood in the 1950s; Jerusalem's Old City and the Western Wall following the Six-Day War; the funeral of S.Y. Agnon; Purim celebrations; and other subjects.
* Thousands of negatives of private studio photographs.
The negatives are stored in about 60 cardboard boxes and inserted in paper envelopes, most of them captioned, numbered and dated. Many include contact prints. In addition, the collection contains six catalog notebooks with notation of the works, their number and the date they were taken (the notebook notation does not include the entire collection, and part of it records earlier works).
Enclosed:
1. About 200 photographs (of different sizes), including photographs of the Western Wall after its occupation in the Six-Day War, granting of military decorations to outstanding soldiers, the return of POWs at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and more.
2. About 30 uncut negative rolls.
The rights to Meyerowitz's photographs will be transferred to the buyer of the archive.
Size and condition of negatives varies. Good overall condition. A small part of the negatives are in fair-poor condition, glued together, damaged or crumbling.
See:
1. Und sie haben Deutschland verlassen... müssen, Fotografen und ihre Bilder, 1928-1997, [Projektleitung]: Published by Klaus Honeff, Frank Weyers. Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Landschaftsverband Rheinland, Bonn, 1997, pp. 330-331.
2. Photographers of Palestine, by Guy Raz. Tel Aviv: Mappa, 2003, p. 141.