Reuven Milon: Photographer who captured Jerusalem’s soul

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 may catch us in mid-flight, because it had been. Then once more, in Milon’s day, actually in Jerusalem of 1953 when the boy was caught within the throes of candy ecstasy, anybody prowling the streets in search of stuff to snap could be fairly noticeable as he lugged his – by at this time’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 residence, his personal childhood house. 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 totally different etiquette instances. “He took pictures all over Israel and the world.

He took pictures of all sorts of craftsmen and tradesmen, beggars, peddlers, children, and so on. As far as I recall, he didn’t use to go up to these people and ask for their permission to take their picture. He’d just stand to the side, observe them, and photograph them. Today, it is not so politically correct to do that. You have to ask them if it’s okay, if they don’t mind.” Even with that in thoughts, contemplating Milon’s demeanor, it’s a truthful wager that if he had requested, few – if any in any respect – would have objected..

We won’t ever know for positive if Milon’s unwitting “sitters” over seven many years 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 may deem to be “the ordinary.” In this case, the topic is aware of the digicam lens is educated on him as he gazes, somewhat 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 common, 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 which 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 instances was very totally different and positively moved at a gentler tempo.

I puzzled whether or not Milon hankered for his hometown of yesteryear, when folks appeared to have extra endurance, when there have been fewer “time-saving” digital and different units round. That comes throughout in a stunning 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 plenty of effort into his work beneath a small signal that reads “Expert in the Repair of Fountain Pens.” How many individuals below the age of fifty at this time even know what a fountain pen is?

If I had been seeking to eke out some Milon angst in regards to the gradual disappearance of the Jerusalem he knew as a boy in the course of the British Mandate, and as a younger man, I used to be to be rebuffed. “I tried to get him to tell me if he was sad over the way the city had changed, and how so many things he’d photographed no longer existed,” Litvin feedback. “But I think he liked it. He saw it as the natural evolution of a city. He did take a nostalgic view of things, but he wasn’t angry. He accepted that new buildings had to replace the old ones. Then again, he felt it was important to preserve some of the older buildings at a time when no one talked about conservation.”

Today, we find out about these demolished structural specters partly due to Milon’s unstinting reportage. “He photographed all sorts of phenomena that have now passed, such as the cinemas of Jerusalem, cafés, all sorts of historic structures like the Generali Building [which still stands at the corner of Jaffa and Shlomzion Hamalka strseet], and, of course, religious structures like synagogues. That is very important.” That included the Mamilla buildings, which had been largely diminished to rubble mendacity in no-man’s land between West Jerusalem and the Jordanian-held Old City.

Despite hailing from a technology that got here from a comparatively technologically primitive Israel, which, for instance, needed to wait many years to look at TV, Milon moved with the instances. On one of many events I visited him, he took me into the diminutive house close to the doorway to the residence the place he labored a lot of his post-snapping magic. He proudly confirmed me a 3D digicam, and he readily embraced digital images.

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 growing and different photographic equipment in a nook of the decrease stage of the now fashionable residence. The implement collage features a guide mild publicity timer and varied different gadgets that may have been leading edge – or thereabouts – when Milon was producing his personal prints.

That, Raz feels, is an extension of Milon’s character. “He was a sensitive, nice person. He didn’t look for opportunities to push himself into the limelight. Perhaps that was to his detriment because he is 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 grew to become referred to as the nationwide warfare 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 in the making”.

That stated, 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 consistently, and sensitively, utilized to the heartbeat of life coursing by way of town he beloved.

Milon additionally had a delicate humorousness, and there are anecdotal slots within the exhibition, some with intriguing contextual worth, corresponding 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 teen peering by way of the legs of his kapota-clad elders, little question at some rabbinical pantheon member. Jerusalem within the snow, a bewitching movie noir-style print of Milon’s spouse, Rina, below 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 have to be stated 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 may need thought the municipality would make investments a modicum of effort in making Milon’s pursuit higher recognized to the general public. Better nonetheless, how about an in depth retrospective on the Israel Museum? Perhaps when he has settled into his workplace chair, incoming Israel Museum director Jacob (Yasha) Grobman may think about it.

Litvin, for one, would help such an initiative. “Reuven’s work is a genuine national asset,” he says. While there are some 60,000 of Milon’s destructive scanned and safely ensconced on the Harvard University archives, there are stated to be a number of hundred thousand ready to be digitized and secured for posterity.