At the height of the argumentative days of the Lebanon War, Ehud Yaari and I were invited to interview Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, who until then had maintained a stormy silence. Though the archives were stocked with many good photographs of Minister Sharon, we could not imagine coming to Sharon’s office in Jerusalem without Micha Kirshner, the staff photographer. In current-day journalistic standards – the prime minister’s plane can take off for Washington without major free press photographers and the newspapers will make do with the uninspiring photos provided by the Government Press Office – reporters normally enter the field without a photographer. A newspaper can send its safari jacketed author all the way to the battlefields in Zaire only to discover upon landing that the photographer was left behind. Well, say the senior editorial staff in their morning meeting, over pastries and cold drinks, we’ll manage with the photographers of the foreign agencies and save a few dollars along the way.
Precisely fifteen years ago we entered the office of the Minister of Defense and saw the frown that appeared on the face of Uri Dan, the minister’s advisor. Dan pulled me aside. Are you crazy? He berated me. The minister invited you for an exclusive interview that will make headlines, the helicopter for Lebanon is waiting on the launching pad, and you bring Kirshner? Do you think you’re “Time Magazine”?
We sat with Sharon for two hours, discussing the 40-kilometer issue that was dividing the nation, while all that time Kirshner circled around us with a motorized “Nikon”, clicking away, like a stubborn buzzing fly. When Dan signaled to the minister that it was time to take off, we had two cassettes full of hot exclusive goods and a racing pulse. We wanted to cut and run to the car before Sharon had any second thoughts and reverted to the selective on-the-record – off-the-record tactic. But from the corner of my eye I could see that Kirshner was not satisfied. How do you know that Kirshner is not satisfied? His normally sharp facial features become even sharper, his nose turns white, and he becomes hostile and querulous.
“Don’t move”, Kirshner ordered Arik Sharon, a man rumored to be averse to acts of obedience, “I’m missing a picture”. The very brutality was enough to immobilize Uri Dan. “Get up please”, Kirshner instructed Sharon, “and go over to the wall. Yes, yes, your back to that wall, and don’t move, don’t look at me and don’t smile”.
Yaari and I looked on despairingly as Kirshner placed Sharon next to a large frame hanging on the wall, containing the utopian verse “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”, a gift from Lily Sharon to her husband.
Sharon stood beside the verse, as ordered by Kirshner, whose automatic “Nikon” snapped a long row of photos, at least two 35mm rolls of film. Uri Dan was in a state of shell shock.

There are not many things I miss from my time as editor. I don’t miss the depressing arguments with the publisher, the Sisyphean battle over the proper ratio between advertisements and journalistic material, the strict schedule, and the proven ability of Israeli printing houses to take the most beautiful color photograph in the universe and turn it into an aerial photograph of the Judean Desert on a hazy day. But I miss, I truly miss, the sweet moments when Kirshner would enter the open space of the editorial office, push his head through the hole where my closed door was originally planned to be, and say to me: Get off your fat behind and come see something. Truly good photographers have a theatrical element in their personality, and they would not have been able to see the “photograph” in our depressing reality. I listened to Kirshner recite monologues that Arthur Miller would have gladly endorsed, usually on long trips when there was no escape. I always wondered how someone so in love with words chose photography of all careers.
He would wait for us next to the light table, the altar on which dozens of human sacrifices were made over the years, though I will never understand what made them willingly submit to Kirshner’s lens and patiently wait for him to steal their soul. Stamping, jumping on the rug, spreading the large slides, framing the chosen photograph, placing the magnifying glass on it – through which I saw the nation’s greatest make fools of themselves – and trying to hide his joy. Five whole years I lived for those moments. Here I am bending towards the magnifying glass, closing an unattuned eye, holding my breath and seeing Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, the apocalyptic prophet, in a black high-neck sweater, peer into Kirshner’s lens as if lingering. Roni Milo making a rude gesture. Charlie Biton shirtless, graffiti scrawled across his chest: “I am a panther”. Yeruham Meshel peering from a half-closed door, Eli Landau clenching his fists and inflating his chest in a black suit, Yiftah Katzur tugging his waistband down until his public hair is visible, the late Haim Bar-Lev and Motta Gur as you have never seen them.
The graphic editor would make a face because he had not been consulted on whether it would be a vertical or horizontal photograph, but then he would break down and smile. Sometimes I would hug Kirshner, although I don’t make a habit of hugging men. Sometimes I would laugh happily, like a fool who has been given a big plastic toy to play with in the sandbox. Sometimes we would fight. Yelling to heaven. You can’t photograph Israel’s Chief Rabbi like an antisemitic caricature, I shouted at him, and he would curse me back. Why is Yael Dayan’s eye bleeding? I asked. It’s not blood, said Kirshner. That was ten years before Dayan had boiling tea spilled on her, but whatever Kirshner put in her eye was so caustic that she was unable to sleep for a week from the pain.

I will take this festive opportunity to say, and I stand by my words, that Kirshner is the most fascinating photographer we ever had. But I have no interest in rankings. Israel’s emotional era of magazine photography was in the 1980s and it died, a murdered dimension, with the death of the magazines that facilitated it. The editors and newspapers that picked up the gauntlet can passionately argue to being our successors and that magazine photography is receiving its due respect. But that is nonsense. Magazine photography has not recovered, just as the printed press has not recovered but rather evolved into a type of obscene mutation, a distant relative of high standard press.
Kirshner is the most fascinating photographer because he is the most persistent. He had his dry years like anyone else but I know that he remained awake at night, calculating how to breach the walls of the photography ghetto. Any editor who did not enjoy Kirshner’s services has no experience of dealing head-on with an opinionated and stubborn photographer, but the truth is that most of the weekend magazine editors worthy of their name worked with him. They know how he walks into a room and throws down provocative photographs that are considered pure art in Shenkin but elsewhere would be considered pornography and sacrilege. He argues vehemently, insists on his rights, but ultimately recognizes the bitter facts of life and leaves the editor mired in mediocrity and chained to the terrible journalistic exigency: to please everyone and avoid annoying anyone.
Looking at Kirshner’s work as a whole gives the apt impression that he became more temperate over time. He is less violent, less aggressive, still hostile and scheming, but the passing time has calmed him. Also his objects, the people who orchestrate our life, whether justly or not, have lost their sense of humor. In the past they would enter his trap with open eyes, surrender with the historical sensation that if Kirshner has photographed them they have entered the national pantheon, reached the top. But today he is able to produce truly crazy photographs only with desperate Israelis who crave attention. Binyamin Netanyahu would not give him more than his preferred profile. You will not catch Yitzhak Mordechai sitting with his back to a large slide of the Dome of the Rock or of Hebron’s Beit Hadassah.
In the 1980s the country had a complacent air about it, which although not reflecting “the situation” did represent a sporting spirit and a less grave and fateful approach than the abject gravity currently characteristic of our life. It is evident that Kirshner’s success rates with treated and amusing photographs were greater among the left-wing than among the right-wing parties. I don’t know what this means. Perhaps greater awareness among the left to the needs of the modern press battling the hegemony of television.

Over the years I was occasionally in the field with Kirshner. The field could be Metula, Kiryat Arba, or Spain. He is the type of friend-partner-colleague that keeps you on your toes. Working alongside him always illustrates for me how much I like photography but hate the photographic process. I have no patience for the incessant dance of courtship and seduction. When he wraps his objects in a sticky web of forced affection, entrapping them – he is the only one to discern that an injured peace dove entered the frame and is in its death throes – convincing them that they came out “okay”. At first I would betray him and secretly slip the experimental polaroids to those photographed, in an attempt to pacify them. Until one day he reproached me: “Don’t you dare do that again”, he hissed. “You don’t show anyone your writing before its published”. So I stopped.
When he starts shooting I look away, daydream, pretend to be deep in some all-encompassing thought. It is hard to believe what people are ready to do to get into the paper. Any paper. Their submissiveness embarrasses me because they do not understand the genre and have no grasp of how the photograph will look on a double-page spread in color with a strong title.
If you only knew what a troublesome occupation photography is. The generators that rattle in a nature setting, the colored background paper, the frightened assistants, the reflector umbrellas, the sun concealed behind the clouds, the many lenses, the polaroids thrown on the ground, fluttering in the wind. It is a very hard and unheroic job where it is only the result, if good, that can transform the photographer into an artist and then a celebrity. At least the stupid argument whether photography is an art seems to have ended.
Late at night, after two days of hard work in Metula, a small town with an aversion to the media, we visited the old cemetery where the region’s heroes are interred. It was a dark night and even the thought that we were driving in Kirshner’s little Renault in a cemetery was enough to give me goosebumps. At first he tried to illuminate one of the headstones with the car lights, but the beams were not aimed right. Bring some rocks, he said to me, and put them next to the tires. The engine straining with effort, the Renault climbed the rocks. Now the light was aimed at the headstones at exactly the right angle.
I kept this framed photograph for many years. Strangely, for me it represents Kirshner at his best. The world of silence. Calm, quiet, terminal photography. As though Kirshner too knew that eventually, from the earth we have come and to the earth we shall return. His great charm when he plays around on every centimeter of this long hard route until the final stop.