‘Coming back to History’ –The Jewish Image in Landscape Photographs of ‘Eretz-Israel’, 1898-1961

Dr Ruth Oren (University of Haifa, Israel) 6.30pm, 6 December 2018 The visual presentation about Zionist landscape photography in Palestine (Eretz-Israel), from its beginning in 1898 until 1961, explores the 'returning' of the Jews to modern history and geography and the formation of the 'mental landscape' of Israel as it was created in the Zionist photographic narrative. Landscape photography, produced and consumed within the National Zionist Institutions, created a utopian image of the Jewish environment by developing a coherent iconography rooted in the hegemonic ideology of cultivating and 'building' a country for the Jewish nation.   Ruth Oren's academic and artistic work ranges from photography to visual communication. She has been a lecturer at the University of Haifa and other academic colleges and has published widely on the history of Israeli photography and Zionist imagery. Dr Oren has curated numerous exhibitions on photography, such as 'Local memory - Photography in Haifa 1912-1949' (Haifa, 1998) and 'Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958' (Tel Aviv, 2008).