Synopsis  

The Last Photograph is a first-of-its-kind exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in which a documentary film is disassembled and re-edited into a multi-channel video installation where viewers can move around freely. 

 The art exhibition as a curatorial form meets the cinematic medium, with the museum offering itself as an experimental platform for a new creative collaboration. In this instance, artist Micha Bar-Am, the father of Israeli photojournalism, opened his archive comprising fifty years of activity for award-winning filmmaker Ran Tal, and the intergenerational encounter spawned a documentary film made up entirely of still photographs that appear consecutively to the sounds of Tal’s poignant conversations with Micha and Orna Bar-Am.

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The archive of Micha Bar-Am, one of the fathers of photojournalism in Israel and the founder of the photography department at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, covers almost all the years of Israeli statehood, in its most beautiful and bleakest moments. From this vast archive of images, many of which are deeply etched in Israeli collective memory, Ran Tal has created a documentary from what is in effect a sequence of still photographs and a soundtrack of an ongoing conversation with Micha and his family. Here, in the museum, the film is taken apart and reassembled into a multi-channel installation that allows free movement among the chapters in the life of a camera.