Silver Print Gallery holds a wide selection of both vintage and later prints made by Schweig himself. (His entire collection is housed in the Israel Museum). He photographed prodigiously for over 50 years. In the early photography of Eretz Israel his is the first body of work to be based on a deep understanding of photographic values
When Schweig started working as a photographer in Haifa in 1925 he was 23 years old. He worked prodigiously for over 50 years and had his first...
more »Silver Print Gallery holds a wide selection of both vintage and later prints made by Schweig himself. (His entire collection is housed in the Israel Museum). He photographed prodigiously for over 50 years. In the early photography of Eretz Israel his is the first body of work to be based on a deep understanding of photographic values
When Schweig started working as a photographer in Haifa in 1925 he was 23 years old. He worked prodigiously for over 50 years and had his first exhibition five years after his arrival in the country. His work was seen in a one-man show at the Royal Photographic Society gallery in London in 1930 and later in Paris. Local landscape photography took on new dimensions in his work. Man became an organic part of the environment. Many early nineteenth-century landscapes of the Holy Land had been un-peopled - silent monuments in a static environment. Schweig's wide landscapes offer another approach. Working or being on the land, no matter whether the subjects were Jews or Arabs, he presented a coaxing of the land to accept the hand of man. Schweig sought out the biblical, epic and poetic elements in the landscape, where man appears in different relationships to nature: at times working in harmony, at others, in awe of the land.
Schweig's work can be said to be the cornerstone of Israeli art photography. His is the first body of work to be based on a deep understanding of photographic values
Bibliography
Documentors of the Dream, Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel, 1890-1933, Vivienne Silver, The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1998; pp. 229-244.
From Mirror to Memory, One Hundred Years of Photography in the Land of Israel, Mane Katz Museum, Autumn 2000, catalogue.
Photographers of Palestine Eretz Israel/Israel (1855-2000), Guy Raz, MAP -Mapping and Publishing and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003.
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