Yochai Bar-On – Prints

Through a non-nostalgic view, through the spectrum of his own subjective memories, Bar-On explores the childhood of his peers and his own at the kibbutz. The central theme of this exhibition is the children and members of the kibbutz as they appear, documented in photographs over the decades. In order to get closer to the personal expression and thereby to examine the distance between the visible beauty and the hidden emotional elements of the photographs Bar-On chose pictures of his classmates and himself. He tries to understand the relationship of those photographed to their ideals through an examination of their body language and expressions.

Childhood years are axiomatically considered as an invariably pleasant and innocent time. This exhibition deals with such a time, though not in a nostalgic way. It is an attempt to explore the childhood of Bar-On’s peers and his own through the spectrum of his own subjective memories.
Today’s kibbutz is rapidly losing it’s unique quality as a collective, in what seems an irreversible process, Bar-On looks back to its starting-point, and to the beginnings of Gal-On kibbutz (where he grew up) that is entering it’s sixtieth years*.
During those years the ‘kibbutz photographer’ recorded and documented holidays and events, the celebrations of the growing community. These photographs were an important and vital part of the Kibbutz lives, a mirror of their existence. They remain today, as a sort of a family album, a story portrayal. Hence, the central theme of this exhibition is children and members of the kibbutz, as they appear documented in photographs over the years and decades.
Bar-On knows these photographs well for he himself appears in some of them as a child. He felt the need to look into the faces of the people in the photographs, young faces, filled with dreams and searched to understand the message they convey. As a child he remembers a distance between the beauty and the vision so visible in the photographs, and his own internal feelings at those events.
In this exhibition Bar-On tries to understand the relationship of those photographed to the kibbutz society and to their ideals through an examination of their body language and expressions.
He chose pictures of his classmates and himself as a gateway by which to approach the personal expression and thereby to examine the distance between the visible beauty and the hidden emotional elements of the photographs. Such is the work titled “Holiday of the First Fruits,” in which a child appears (Bar-On) wearing a wreath on his head – of which he still remembers how much that wreath scratched!
It seems natural that the style of many of these photographs tended to fit into the prevalent ‘Socialist Realism’. This style which he once rejected as being an expression of ‘propaganda’. Now, however, because of the changes in the structure of the kibbutz, it appears to him, not as propaganda but as a way for people to tell their story and to portray themselves as they saw themselves.

* Kibbutz Gal-On was settled on the night after Yom Kippur, as part of an operation in which eleven groups settled on the lands of the Negev.(Bar-on thanks to Yochanan Simon who’s works on the subject of Kibbutz living opened for him the door to his own dealing with this subject).