In the Service of the High Commissioner  - בשירות הנציב העליון

Zvi Oron-Orushkes, Photographer

Erets Israel Museum, Tel Aviv 2013

Zvi Oron was born Hershel Orushkes in 1888 in Bialistok on the Russian-Polish border. In his youth he learned photography from his brother-in-law, but  he always wanted to work in journalism. In 1913 he immigrated to the United States where he continued to work in photography. After the Balfour Declaration (1917) Orushkes responded to David Ben Gurion’s and Yitzhak Ben Zvi’s call to enlist to the Jewish Legion; he reached Palestine after the British conquest as a soldier in the Jewish Legion. . After he was discharged from the army, Orushkes opened a photography studio and began documenting the momentous events of the period. High Commissioner John Chancellor officially appointed him in 1929 as the provider of photographic services to the British government in Palestine. Thus, he could move freely between the Mandatory institutions and military facilities. His Jewish origins, strong connections with the British, and the fact that the Arabs trusted him, accorded him direct access to his subjects.

Orushkes was one of the first Jewish photojournalists who worked in Palestine and one of the most important documentary photographers of the British Mandate.

In his memoirs Orushkes speaks of himself as a person totally dedicated to the truth, a mad man who was not afraid to show it. He said that he was devoid of artistic or ideological motives and adhered, almost obsessively, to his goal: creating an unbiased picture of the time and place. And indeed, the great value of his archives attest to its historical importance: 60,000 negatives depict life in Mandatory Palestine from an unusual angle.

The exhibition seeks to examine Orushkes’s work on two levels: the narrative one, which expands the Zionist story in the daily life of a British colony, and the esthetic one, that positioned him in the photographic praxis and uncovers the spontaneity of his perspective: minute and human moments within historical events, the encounter between the private and the public, and between the individual and the ideological view.

At the time, the Zionist Yishuv rejected his photographs as they were not sufficiently committed to the cause. Today, when the place of the individual and society has changed, we are able to cherish Zvi Orushkes’s broad perspective as an important historical testimony

Viewing his photographs is not only nostalgic; the reality of the present is reflected in photographs of the past and his unique point of view reminds us that despite nostalgic fascination, not much is new under the sun.

Exhibition curator - Michal BenTovim

Cataloge and Graphic design - Nadav Shalev

from the Zionist Archive

from the Jerusalem Post