“Danger of drowning”, reads one of many warning signs in a recent photograph of a reservoir by the Israeli photographer Alex Levac. “There are maybe ten signs that say not to go into the water, it’s dangerous. And you see tens of people in the water,” Levac says of the contrarian swimmers ignoring the signage and taking the plunge. They all seek respite, come what may.
“These are photos that tell stories about Israeli society,” Levac says. He is known for such photographs, which are at once poignant and bizarre, often capturing within a single frame what might equally pass as an everyday scene or a metaphor. Alongside his incisive views of public spaces, he also takes photographs with a clear political focus. A selection of such images, to which Levac, now in his 80s, has devoted his long and award-winning career, will feature in Black Box, a retrospective opening at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art at a consequential moment for the country: the Israeli legislative elections on 27 October.
The exhibition will open two days before election day and in a satellite location of the main museum campus, the Eyal Ofer Pavilion. It adjoins Habima Square, a central site of weekly protests for the past four years. Taken together, the exhibition’s location, timing and Levac’s subject matter make this retrospective a pointed statement.
‘Maybe the timing is right’
“We’re standing before a turning point. There’s a feeling within the public, and certainly I share it too, that something different will happen here,” Levac says. “We’ve been through a very difficult period over the past three years. So maybe in that way, the timing is right. It summarises a certain period, and from here we can start something new.”
Levac’s art-world recognition has come somewhat late due to the photojournalistic nature of his work—this is his first major museum show. “He certainly has a place,” says Sophia Berry, the exhibition’s co-curator and the museum’s associate curator of photography. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art recently acquired more than 50 Levac photographs for its permanent collection, another catalyst for the exhibition.
Most of those acquisitions will be included among the roughly 200 photographs in the exhibition, documenting historical moments, daily life and times of crisis with a characteristic balance of irony, empathy and, occasionally, horror. The show begins with early-career photographs that Levac took after completing his studies in philosophy and psychology, when he was living between England and Brazil, some of which have never been published or exhibited.
The core of the retrospective consists of his prints produced in Israel between 1984 and 2002—charged years that included the first and second intifadas, the Oslo accords, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and other important events. Another section will be devoted to his colour photography from 2010 onwards, and a slideshow of his current weekly photographs published in Haaretz, the newspaper where he has been a staff photographer since 1993.
The original negative for one of Levac’s best-known photographs, Kav 300 (1984), will also be on view. Taken during his first year back in Israel after living abroad for 14 years, it documents an incident in April 1984 during which Palestine Liberation Organisation terrorists hijacked a public bus and took 41 passengers hostage. Levac photographed one of the four terrorists being taken into custody, proving that he had been captured alive—and not killed during the rescue operation, as an official report claimed. “Kav 300 changed my relationship to the work. It gave me a shot of adrenalin that lasted many years,” Levac says. “I understood the importance of photography, I saw it with my own eyes.”
Levac has continued his politically focused photography. For almost two decades, he has accompanied the journalist Gideon Levy to take photographs illustrating a weekly Haaretz column, documenting life and hardships in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“He’s a photographer that is always doing both. It’s part of his great skill: to be on and off duty, all the time,” says Tamara Abramovich, the exhibition’s co-curator and the museum’s photography curator. The polarity of his work—showing the harshest sights, and also the funniest—elicits charged silences and laughter in equal measure.
The past few years have been particularly complex, culminating in this month’s pivotal elections. Levac says he looks for different things now from what he did earlier in his career. “If in my photos before, it was important to me that there be a smile—a certain criticism, but with a wink—now the smile seems redundant, in a way. We’re in a very sad period, very difficult and, in some ways, hopeless,” he says. He recalls one of his early photography instructors claiming that photography can influence the viewer; Levac used to agree. “As time has passed, I’ve changed my mind,” he says. “I don’t think photography can have an impact or make a difference. I think it can expose things and document things, but can it make a change? I doubt it.”
His sentiment reflects the despair of the moment, but it is also at odds with the fact that this 82-year-old photographer still goes everywhere with a camera around his neck. He also requested that his political photographs be the focus of his retrospective.
“Alex doesn’t believe that photography can create change, yet he still continues the work,” Abramovich says. “There’s this tension between the criticism that he has, and his frustration—and a certain optimism.”
• Alex Levac: Black Box, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 25 October-June 2027
