Not all photographers have to earn a living. Alfred Stieglitz married well. Edward Weston built a little house with his own hands, and had circumspect eating habits. The French government awarded Louis-Jacques Daguerre a handsome pension for the rights to his invention. But Ansel Adams supported himself most of his life with hack commercial work in San Francisco. Leon Levinstein shot during lunch breaks from his tedious job laying out advertising brochures. And, since people will pay for newspapers and magazines that illustrate the news, many individuals talented with a camera have worked as photojournalists, although one once told Micha Bar-Am that “photojournalism beats making a living.”

Mr. Bar-Am, born in Germany in 1930, is Israel’s pre-eminent photojournalist. Between 1957 and 1966 he worked for Bamachane, a popular magazine published by the army. During the 1967 Six Day War, he teamed up with Cornell Capa, who then helped him join the mighty Magnum photo agency, and between 1968 and 1992 he was a contract photographer for the New York Times. A representative selection of his work over the last half-century is currently on display at the Andrea Meislin Gallery, and it is clear that for Mr. Bar-Am, photojournalism is not just a living, but a calling. What would you expect from a boy who dreamed of getting a Leica for his bar mitzvah?

It took him 10 years to get the Leica, and it was a used Leica as old as he was. But the camera was put to the service of a visual acuity Mr. Bar-Am was born with: a talent for dramatic composition, a determination to find the truth in a situation, and a predisposition for irony. That last characteristic lets him find humor in desperately grim realities, an important survival tool for Israelis. For instance, the first image in the Meislin Gallery exhibition is “Family Portrait With Cat, Ramat-Gan, Gulf War” (1991). Shot in a suburb of Tel Aviv, the tightly framed picture of a mother, father, and child, each wearing a gas mask, shows them huddled together while Saddam Hussein rains down Scud missiles. The masks have huge goggle eyes and big canister air filters that look like high-tech snouts and make the three grotesque. A cat held in the lap of the middle figure stares at the camera; the one normal element in the picture, it makes the whole surreal.

Humor is a critical element in “Taba Beach, Sinai” (1982), in which bikini clad Israeli women are being approached by Bedouins selling souvenirs. The Bedouins are wearing their traditional robes and are accompanied by their goats and camels. Welcome to the Middle East! In “Tel Aviv Zoo” (1974), Mr. Bar-Am caught a man sitting on a bench whose nose resembles the beak of the pelican strutting behind him. The model on the outdoor runway in the foreground of “Fashion Show in Women’s Corps Army Base” (1973) is headless; he shot her from the shoulders down, so we see her trim body and short striped skirt parading past bleachers filled with the female soldiers in their sexless uniforms.

There are news stories, though, that preclude humor. “Artillery Barrage, Suez Canal, Yom Kippur War (Prisoners)” (1973) has nothing funny about it. A 39.5-inch-by-59-inch lambda print, the foreground is taken up with massed prisoners, their faces down, hugging the ground for safety. One prisoner lifts his bandaged head to look at the camera, and his fear is the focal point of the picture. The background is obscured by the dust and smoke of combat. Three emotional pictures titled “The Return From Entebbe. Freed Hostages, Ben Gurion Airport” (1976) capture the end of the dramatic rescue operation. In the second picture, Mr. Bar-Am placed the camera very close to the elbow of a woman hugging one of the returned men. Her forearm is distorted, huge, and emphasizes the strength of her feelings as much as the intense expression on her face.

In Meislin’s Second Gallery are Mr. Bar-Am’s portraits of many of Israel’s past and present leaders. These are not studio portraits, composed at leisure, but a photojournalist’s portraits taken on the fly; nonetheless they disclose much of their subject’s character. In “Golda Meir, Prime Minister in an Airforce Helicopter, Sinai” (1970), she sits slumped over with her head in her hand. “Moshe Dayan, Kalandya Refugee Camp, West Bank” (1967) is shot from behind; two Arabs wear robes and headdresses, and Dayan’s one good eye strains to do the work of two. In “Likud Party Convention, Tel Aviv” (1988), Benjamin Netanyahu, Dan Meridor, and Ehud Olmert, three ambitious young politicians, sit shoulder to shoulder at a table, each with his chin in his hand, and a picture of Theodor Herzl looks down on them from the wall.

“Beehives Near Mount Tabor” (1981) and “Sinai” (1980) are evocative landscapes that show Mr. Bar-Am has a talent for photographic genres other than journalism, but one feels that for him “photojournalism beats making a living.” The apparent speed with which he can organize a well-composed picture, and his delight in significant juxtapositions could only be fully utilized in photojournalism. “Demonstration Western Wall, Jerusalem” (1989) is a signature image; a religious Jew covered with a prayer shawl flees a smoking canister. His leap is balletic, like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s puddle-jumper behind the Gare St. Lazare. A menorah on the stanchion of a guard chain in the foreground and the stone plaza and wall define the space through which he moves. The telling Bar-Am gesture, though, is the inclusion of a figure at the far left, another religious Jew dimly seen through the smoke, who sits unmoved, doing what he was doing, indifferent to the swirling mist and confusion.

wmeyers@nysun.com

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