In the 21st century when an artist, particularly one who is Jewish, chooses to engage the Bible through his art, it is natural to see the result as a form of midrash – the tradition of biblical exegesis that imparts a deeper meaning to biblical legend and makes it relevant to contemporary readers. That is what prominent Israeli photographer Adi Nes (b. 1966) has done in his series Biblical Stories (2003-2006), bringing a visual panoply drawn from art history, cinema, and the popular media to bear on familiar biblical texts. Nes’s insights are rendered through acute observations of humanity articulated in the gestures, poses, and expressions of his characters and the settings they inhabit.
Nes may be compared to Jeff Wall, the Canadian photographer who popularized contemporary staged photography beginning in the late 1970s. Nes’s photographs are intensely physical, with a three-dimensionality enhanced by chiaroscuro lighting, narrative drama, and intense realistic characterization indebted to Caravaggio. Like Wall, he uses actors, although they are not professionals, but ordinary people, and he emphasizes narratives that are open ended, not deterministic, to tell stories about real people and everyday experience. Also, like Wall, he creates cinematographic images that refer to art history, but unlike him he does not rely on digital manipulation or composite images. Perhaps this more traditional approach accounts in part for the great humanism emanating from Nes’s work.
The fourteen images in the series on view at the Tel Aviv Museum through May 23 represent biblical heroes as today’s homeless and dispossessed, focusing on their human qualities, their sufferings and hardships. As in his earlier Boys series (2000), the background for Biblical Stories is the social and political reality of contemporary Israel, as it moves further and further away from the socialist ideology of its founders. A photograph from the Boys series, referring to Itzhak Danziger’s 1938-39 sandstone sculpture Nimrod, already evinced Nes’s awareness of the extent to which biblical narratives have been harnessed to the historiography of the contemporary State of Israel, validating constructions of national identity. His work turned a spotlight on the ambivalent legacy of Nimrod, a biblical hero who was recognized as a mighty hunter as well as a tyrannical ruler – and yet was taken up as an emblem by the cultural-political movement known as “The Canaanites,” which attempted in the 1940s and 50s to shape an Israeli national identity based on ancient Semitic culture. Nes’s engagement with the image of Nimrod was related to constructions of masculinity, particularly masculine Israeli identity, as part of what the artists has described as his questioning of “the dream and what happened to it.” The Biblical Stories series continues this interrogation, particularly as it looks at the promise Israel has held for immigrants from different backgrounds.
Undermining the purity and promise embodied in the idea of the biblical landscape, Nes chooses the contemporary urban environs of Tel Aviv as the setting for the series. Here one finds a landscape blighted by urban decay in which his figures are alienated from the very land that has given meaning to modern Israeli national identity. Such alienation is a profound symptom of disillusionment: to be homeless in the Jewish homeland is the ultimate irony.
In conceptualizing the Biblical Stories series, Nes draws inspiration from early photographic views of Palestine that pictured contemporary inhabitants as if they had emerged directly out of the biblical text. The demand from tourists, pilgrims, and other Christians for images of the sites that Jesus walked made photography of the Holy Land a profitable enterprise in the 19th century. The rational and scientific nature of the new medium made photography the perfect tool to establish the “truth” of the events of the Bible and legitimize actions based on such affirmations. (Protestants, in particular, with their millennial fervor, sought to convert Jews and Muslims as a precondition of the Second Coming of Christ). The actual lives of the people who lived on the land at the time were obscured by colonizing interests, as is evident in many early survey photographs from which such figures are absent altogether. Other images that did include local people at biblical sites and ruins – most often Arabs and Bedouins – tended to present them in a “timeless” way. As Vivienne Silver-Brody has suggested in Documentors of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1998), the land was imaged as “a symbol of faith” framed by Christian theology.
Early Zionists also framed their photographs through a biblical lens, but with other motivations: they envisioned continuity with the Jewish past of Eretz Israel. Artist E.M. Lilien, often called the “first Zionist artist,” created biblical illustrations at the fin-de-siècle based on photographic images of costumed local inhabitants for a European market. In affirmation of “the aims of national Zionism” in 1919 (and as noted by Silver-Brody in her study) Ya’acov Ben-Dov photographed a student from the Bezalel Art Academy as Ruth in Bedouin-style clothing, gleaning the fields and holding a sheaf of wheat. Rather than performing the back-breaking work of collecting the leftovers from the harvest, his Ruth was portrayed in a Pictorialist mode within the conventions of ideal 19th-century bourgeois womanhood. To paraphrase Silver-Brody, photography played a central role in grafting a new culture onto an old one. It is significant then that photography, as Nes’s work attests, has also played a central role in deconstructing the myths of national identity that the medium had helped to establish.
In a very real sense, all of Nes’s work is about the identities within himself – his Iranian ancestry, his origins in the southern development town of Kiryat Gat, his gay identity, his identity as an artist, as a Jew, and as an Israeli. In this series, he has displaced biblical heroes with contemporary immigrants – the poor, the homeless, and those on the margins of society. They, in turn, have displaced the heroes of earlier Israeli photography of the pioneer generations – the dramatic photographs of nation building and cultivation of the land; in a phrase, images documenting the dream. Undermining these official narratives of Israeli society, Nes’s images advance the cause of creating a new story.
David and Jonathan (2004) The renewed importance of biblical mythology in Israeli culture in the wake of the 1967 War was instrumental in nurturing Nes’s identity and in shaping his work. (He refers to that war in one of the photographs from his Soldiers series [1994-2000] by quoting the famous Life magazine cover of June 23, 1967, featuring the disarmingly handsome Yossi Ben Hanan with a captured AK-47 cooling off in the Suez Canal). Israel’s triumph over its enemies has often been read through the victory of David over Goliath, understood in accord with the Zionist adaptation of biblical narratives to validate contemporary national and political ones. Yet in this photograph, rather than the heroism of David in his defeat of Goliath, Nes chooses to represent David with Jonathan – the beautiful youths whose relationship has figured in art and literature as a homoerotic trope. In Nes’s oeuvre, homoeroticism plays a role as a mechanism that exposes the ambivalence in a national narrative grounded in a mythos of heroic masculinity. The moment that Nes represents does not have an exact parallel in the Bible, but it suggests both their parting at which they “kissed one another, and they wept with one another, until David [wept] greatly” (1 Sam. 20:41) and their rendezvous in the Wilderness at Ziph (1 Sam. 23:16-18), when they made a covenant with God and it was understood that Jonathan had put aside his ambitions for David’s sake. The young man playing the red-haired David looks directly yet cautiously into the camera, while sheltering the younger boy, Jonathan, who leans into him for support. The pose alludes to the way in which David held his harp, so that he appears to be plucking or playing Jonathan, releasing a silent yet soothing music.
Cain and Abel (2003) In Cain and Abel (2003) Nes presents another story of homelessness as well as fratricide. Cain murdered his brother out of jealousy that God accepted Abel’s offering but not his own (Gen. 4: 3-8). An altar for the offering may be suggested by the stepped stone platform in the photograph. It is Cain who uttered the famous question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” when God asked what had happened to Abel. “What have you done?!” God responded. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground” (Gen. 4: 9-10), a moment to which the artist alludes with water dripping down the wall. Abel was punished as God declared that the earth that had absorbed Abel’s blood would be barren and Cain was forced to wander in search of fertile land. And as punishment for his sin, Cain became a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth,” banished to the land of Nod where exiles wander (Gen. 4:14). Nes has addressed the story in two photographs in the series. In the image seen here he casts the Israeli “free fighting champion” and his nemesis in the roles of Cain and Abe l. Although one brother clearly has the advantage over the other, can we really be sure which one is Cain and which Abel? Cain must be the brother with the upper hand, the one with the primitive, animal-like appearance. Yet despite the fact that in the Bible Cain is marked by God for striking down his brother – in evident contradiction of the story – in the photograph Abel is the brother who is heavily tattooed. This ambiguity is in part a measure of the personalities of the “actors,” both titans, neither of whom wanted to be cast as the loser. Thus the photograph reflects the complexity of each brother’s character as well as an alternate reading. Nes seeks to express the idea that “the victim and the perpetrator of violence represent such misery which they have bequeathed to the present human condition.” Perhaps the photograph represents an earlier moment when Abel had the upper hand over his brother, alluding to some biblical commentators’ gloss that Abel was actually the stronger of the two brothers and that Cain tricked Abel into releasing his grasp on him so that he could overcome him.
Hagar (2005) Judaism is founded on the paradox of exile. In Genesis 12:1 Abraham, the first Patriarch, is commanded by God: “Go for yourself from your land, from your relatives and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation.” Abraham obeys and leaves with his wife, Sarah, for Canaan – Eretz Israel. There God appears to Abraham and tells him: “To your offspring will I give this land” (Gen. 12:7). Yet later, Abraham is also told that his offspring “shall be aliens in a land that is not their own.” Nes engages the story of Abraham and his family in two photographs, Abraham and Isaac and Hagar. In Hagar, the protagonist appears as a beggar in a deteriorating, leaf-strewn stairwell open to the elements. The story of Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion by Abraham and Sarah is often used as a symbol of the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 War and her name has been appropriated by Israeli peace activists. Nes’s depiction of Hagar can also be interpreted in light of narratives of feminine identity in Israeli culture and their imbrication in politics. Read against projections of Oriental and European notions of femininity vis a vis constructions of Israeli female identity, she is neither the passive, exotic beauty nor the hardworking pioneer who nourishes the land. Yet circumscribed by her role as mother, she is representative of the universalized suffering of a woman who has lost or may lose a child. An icon of anguished Arab or Jewish motherhood, lost in the desert, Hagar is a woman cut off from the land that defines her through the functions of giving birth to and nourishing the boys who will grow into the men who will inherit and control that land or die for it.
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In the photograph, Nes chooses a model with features resembling Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936), and even poses her and styled her hair similarly. Lange’s stark black-and-white image, considered the very quintessence of the documentary mode, is acknowledged in Nes’s almost ashen hues. Widely published during the Depression, Lange’s photograph remains an iconic image from the period. Nes’s allusion to specifically social documentary photography, here and in other series, extends his photographs’ meaning from the particularity of poverty and oppression in Israel to general conditions in contemporary society.
Like Lange’s migrant mother, Nes’s Hagar is uprooted and homeless. Lange’s mother, her face showing signs of age beyond her thirty-two years, touches the side of her mouth near her chin; Hagar, too, covers her mouth in worry, maybe also in shock. Both women look out of the picture without confronting the camera. Nonetheless, Nes’s picture differs significantly from Lange’s, which included two of the woman’s children who cling to her. In Nes’s image, Hagar’s despair is intensified by the very fact that her son is missing from the picture; poignantly, she makes a cupping gesture with her left hand as a sign of that emptiness.
Abraham and Isaac (2004) In the biblical story God tests Abraham’s faith by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. When they arrive at their destination, Abraham binds Isaac to the altar and raises his hand to slaughter him. At the last possible moment, a messenger of God appears and stops Abraham by providing him with a ram that he can offer instead. Abraham merits God’s blessings due to his devotion. Nes has based this composition on Duane Hanson’s Pop-era Supermarket Shopper (1970), which featured an absurdly made-up woman pushing a cart full of food – not a particularly political work at the time, but in retrospect an indictment of American consumerism and overabundance at a time when much of the world went hungry.
Nes’s Abraham is another homeless figure, old and unkempt, a familiar sight in some of the wealthiest cities in the world, where the destitute make their living collecting cans and bottles for recycling. He carries his young son, Isaac, asleep on top of the trash that fills his shopping cart. Abraham intentionally resembles Caravaggio’s Abraham in The Sacrifice of Isaac (1601-02). Significantly, Nes’s portrayal of a serene Isaac is a more Jewish interpretation of the story than Caravaggio gave it: according to a midrash, Isaac, who was thirty-seven at the time, understood what was happening and did not resist his father out of filial respect. As in other photographs from the series, Nes does not illustrate a particular moment in the story. He leaves open the question of whether Abraham is on his way to Mount Moriah or returning from there. He also leaves the meaning of the cart itself ambiguous: only the burnt pieces of wood sticking out from its sides suggest that the cart itself may represent the altar. The idea that the cans and bottles in the cart will be redeemed suggests a further play on the redemption of Isaac, who is redeemed by the sacrifice of the ram in his place. But whether that will happen in this case remains to be seen.
Jacob and Esau (2006) The twins Jacob and Esau are different from each other in appearance and temperament. Much of the biblical commentary denigrates Esau as duplicitous and idolatrous, while praising Jacob for his high morals and studiousness, and affirming his efforts to secure his inheritance and his fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gen. 17:3-8). Nonetheless, the biblical story of the two brothers does not dwell on the complexity of their rivalry, nor on the intricate nuances of both their characters. This is what fascinates Nes. He depicts the moment when Esau sells Jacob his birthright in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew. According to commentators, Esau’s contempt for his birthright proved that he had been “neither duped nor defrauded….it had no value to him when he was famished and it remained meaningless after he was gorged” (Rabbi Nosson Scherman, ed., The Chumash, 1993). In the photograph, Nes departs from the biblical story, adding his own midrash by including Isaac at the table. Esau sits to his father’s privileged side, at the right hand of Isaac and close to him; Jacob is at a distance, to his left.
The contemporary setting in Nes’s photograph is a soup kitchen, and the composition is based on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1606). Nes exploits Caravaggio’s dramatic handling of light in the depiction of Jacob’s profile, the strong shadows cast on the wall and the halo-like projection coming through the window onto the back of Esau’s head. Although a redhead, Esau has the traditional features of Jesus. He sits upright and composed, with his arms outstretched toward the bowl of lentils that the dark haired and swarthy Jacob pushes toward him across the table. In Nes’s reading of the story, the visual codes that suggest moral and ethical lessons to the viewers are ambivalent. The allusion to the Supper at Emmaus also adds another layer of meaning. The Gospel of Luke relates that on the day of the resurrection Jesus appeared to two disciples on the road to Emmaus and was invited by them to eat something although they did not recognize him. During the meal Jesus revealed himself and then disappeared. The composition’s echo of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, along with Esau’s resemblance to conventional representations of Jesus and Jacob’s to Judas, also underscore the moral ambivalence of Jacob’s actions. Nes sees even the soup kitchen, where everyone is wanting, as pervaded by an atmosphere of deceit and manipulation.
Ruth and Naomi (2006) The Book of Ruth is deeply connected to the story of King David and to the giving of the Torah which occurred during Shavuot, marking the spring harvests of barley and wheat. After their husbands had died, Naomi, a refugee from Judea who fled to Moab during a period of famine, decided to return to her homeland and started out with her daughters-in-law, but then told them to return to their own mothers to find new husbands. One, Orpah, obeyed, but the other, Ruth, stubbornly refused, declaring to Naomi, “Your people are my people, your God, my God” (Ruth 1:16), and she vowed to die before being separated from her. Though the biblical story stresses Naomi’s belief that the women must find husbands to care for them, Nes emphasizes Ruth and Naomi’s self-reliance and mutual dependence. Ruth – whose name means compassion – in dedicating herself to Naomi and to her people is sometimes popularly referred to as a convert to Judaism, giving a remarkable genealogy to her great-grandson, King David.
Naomi and Ruth returned to Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest. With Naomi’s approval, Ruth went to glean fallen grain from a field being harvested as was customary for the poor to do in those days. Boaz, the landowner, appeared and became interested in her. He was generous, providing her with food and comfort. When Naomi learned that it was Boaz’s field on which Ruth had been working, she encouraged her daughter-in-law to entice Boaz who, in the language of the Bible, agreed to redeem her in appreciation for her loving kindness toward him. Naomi’s motivation has been understood as manifesting her belief that a marriage between Ruth and Boaz will reinstate her community standing as well as secure entitlement to lost family property.
The agricultural landscapes described in the Book of Ruth found their counterparts in photographic images of the Holy Land. In Nes’s photograph, the fields of Eretz Israel have been replaced by a modern open air market in which the poor glean leftovers at the end of the day. In Nes’s interpretation, Naomi has joined Ruth in this undertaking. In a field whose utter chaos marks a site of destruction, scarcity, and disruption, rather than the fruits and promise of the land, the women have been posed like the figures in Millet’s The Gleaners of 1857, a work in which the rural peasants were represented with great dignity and nobility. In photography in pre-State Israel women were often seen cultivating the land, workers on an equal footing with men in the service of nation building. As Irit Rogoff has suggested in her 1998 book Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, such representations of the bodies of women who nurtured and made the land fertile were “used to make claims to the land and to render those claims naturalized and organic” (p. 159). In Nes’s photograph the women are scavengers rather than nurturers of the land, thus their representations speak to and deconstruct such earlier representations.