Gérard Alon: a Retrospective
Gérard Allon played a leading role in the important shifts occurring in the field of Israeli photography in the dramatic decade following the Yom Kippur War. A retrospective gaze at his works reveals a highly skilled professional, who succeeded at capturing the social energies of this tumultuous period, drawing the artistic realm closer to the popular and the commercial realm closer to the social. Allon consolidated a new professional approach to the medium of the record- album cover, and worked as a fashion photographer and as the in-house photographer of Habima Theater. At the same time, he created significant personal works.
Gérard Allon was born in 1949 in Casablanca and immigrated to Israel at age 25, in the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. He encountered the painful reality of a post-traumatic Israel, in which the war had instigated a deep crisis while contributing to the eruption of the photographic medium into the center of the artistic arena. In contrast to native Israeli photographers of his generation, he was forced to learn the complex codes of local visual images, and of the local ethos and narrative, at lightning speed, just as they were disintegrating and being reconstructed.
On his quest to familiarize himself with the Israeli experience, Allon encountered local photography, which was also undergoing a transformation from an ideologically conscripted medium to a personal, critical and subversive practice. In his numerous photographs of singers, models and
actors, Allon managed to capture the personality hidden from the eye, and to reveal an additional dimension of familiar public figures.
He directed the photographed scenes and used sets and lighting, yet the uniqueness of his work centers on the reciprocal relations between him and his subjects. Regardless of whether they were photographed in his studio or in an abandoned house on the seam line between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the encounter gave rise to an intimate moment that Allon was able to capture.
This is self-conscious photography in which there is no room for chance, since the subject is positioned within a pre-planned photographic frame. This exhibition is the first attempt to cast a comprehensive retrospective gaze at Gérard Allon’s oeuvre from the 1960s to the present, as a continuum of works that explores reality through the camera lens. This body of works must thus be viewed as a single ensemble, in which different subjects entertain relations based on affinities and reciprocities, developed over the course of five decades. The transitions between the different fields in which Allon worked over time (music, theater, fashion and personal works) do not blur his signature style as a photographer- artist, whose complex gaze has been inflected by the different cultures he moved among over the years. It is the double gaze of a foreign immigrant watching from the sidelines, as well as of an Israeli who acts to impact the local landscape.
The professional and technical innovations he introduced into the fields of pop music, theater and visual art cast him as a groundbreaking figure, who has exerted his influence as a teacher on students in various schools.
The exhibition and the accompanying book offer a glimpse of Israel’s nascent cultural sphere as it was being consolidated, while analyzing Allon’s signature handwriting as a photographer-artist.
