The Hero’s Soft Spot
Billy Muskuna Lerman
“Ma’ariv” Newspaper, 11.2.2000
Before you stands a young man, one could say
a sensitive one. Born in Kiryat Gat, he was an instructor in the “Shomer
HaTzair” (youth movement), finished his army service, moved to Jerusalem,
signed up for Photography studies in “Bezalel”, was a talented student,
sensitive, looked for a job and found part-time work in the employment
department for disabled ex-servicemen on behalf of the Ministry of Security,
and there he met a group of tired and dusty people, not heroic. People with an
internal wound, not always visible; mentally wounded, war shocked, girls who
were raped in the army and received recognition as disabled army victims,
parents who lost their children and ceased functioning. In short, people that
army and war had brushed aside, to the edges of life.
For a modest sum, his job was to somehow
help them pass the time. In other words, psychotherapy for the poor. He would
sit with them three or four times a week. One day he met a middle-aged woman.
The professional term for her was “bereaved mother”. He remembers a woman full
of life who told him the following story simply: “I was baking a cake for my
son, he was in the army, he was 20 years old, it was his birthday. I lost track
for a moment and the cake burnt in the oven, and when I ran to save it, there
was a ring at the door. At the entrance stood an army delegation, my son had
gone up in flames, burned alive in a temporary army camp near the Dead Sea”.
This young and sensitive man is called Adi
Nes, and day after day he listened to the life stories of those people whose
lives were destroyed by our country’s wars. Nes devoted himself. He helped them write, document,
photograph, and gradually, their words soaked into him, seeped into his blood,
settled and arose in his thoughts and dreams, until years later, they took the
shape of an exhibition focused on soldiers, Israeli Defense Force soldiers, who
are at the central foundation of Israeli identity.
Of course, underlying the choice to
photograph soldiers is a bursting life. Adi Nes, male, homosexual, asks
questions about masculine identity through his photographs, and asks about
Israeli masculinity in the state in which he lives, a military state.
A homosexual who photographs soldiers can
provoke and irritate the narrow minded, the conservative, the complacent, the
self-assured. Knock on wood, how dare he (we have heard them do so); it is
these very same confident know-it-alls who used to be officers and are supposed
to be running our lives today who should visit Adi Nes’ exhibition. The
exhibition is surprising, beautiful, poetic.
Make no mistake, Adi Nes has no interest in
angering anyone. He doesn’t believe in shocking. With his characteristic
gentleness, he succeeds in quietly, subtly and wisely, opening a door to a new
option, showing that nothing is just black and white; that the soldier now
smiling in the photograph could be wounded a moment later.
In Adi Nes’ photograph, you see a powerful
soldier, he is adventurous and determined, but you have another possibility.
Nes succeeds in showing something else. Look, he seems to say, this soldier,
indeed every soldier, has a soft belly.
In 1993, during Israel’s first Gay Pride
Week, there was a small festival in Shenkin Street in Tel-Aviv. A closet was
placed amongst the stands. A soldier had his picture taken beside the closet
and his photograph was published in the newspaper “Hadashot”. The soldier’s
name was Yossi MaKayton, and his became a news story and made an impact on the
path marked years later by the young photographer Adi Nes.
The homosexual soldier who was photographed
in his army uniform beside the closet was judged, thrown into jail, thrown out of the army. “I was
enraged,” says Nes. The army took its values and forced them onto the civilians
of Shenkin Street”.
This incident raised Nes’ first questions
about the place of the army in our lives. What is the connection between army,
masculinity and homosexuality; questions which became photographs which became
exhibitions, which received prizes and were displayed in museums and leading
galleries in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and New York.
Nes knew that he was different from a young
age, and had always looked for soul mates. “In Kiryat Gat, to say “homo” was
like saying transvestite, it was as bad as spitting”. He can’t remember himself
looking for physical contact, rather for emotional intimacy. He needed to talk,
to ponder, debate. And at the same time, he was always drawn to the
kibbutzniks, the sportsmen, those who were clearly to later become pilots.
In his class, there was an outstanding
potential ‘pilot’, the most successful, the handsomest, the most sporty and
talented. “Let’s say it straight,” says Nes. “I was in love with him. Over the
years he became a pilot and I became a flight supervisor. We served together.
The watchtower I served in was small, a phallus rising into the air, it was
called the “Kedem Tower”. There was a story that years before, a pilot who
hadn’t received permission to land had gone up to the tower to see what had
happened and caught the male and female flight supervisors sleeping together,
so he said: “From now on there will be only men in the tower”. And that began
the big awakening.
“We were a few men on the edge of the
desert, in a small and intimate place, and there began the discussions on
homosexuality, on the possibility of attraction to boys, the repression of that
attraction. I said to myself, I want to photograph my beautiful pilot, the one
I am in love with, and I asked him for his uniform. I took it home and wore it,
with his smell, his sweat, I felt ecstatically happy. Afterwards, I worked on
the photograph, I used a model and photographed him doing a handstand, flexible
and beautiful, firm and powerful muscles, and out of that strength, his shirt
falls away to reveal his stomach. And who exposed his stomach? I did, the
photographer. Because I can see the option which he can’t”.
Each of Adi Nes’ photographs is produced
with pedantic attention to detail. He will work on a photograph for months,
sometimes years at a time, choosing the precise location, the actor, the props,
the lighting. A photo shoot is like a production, built on split seconds
because of the light and its changes. There is a producer, food catering, an equipment
manager, a certain hour of the day, a certain light, a particular setting.
The photo shoot lasts all day, a long quiet
day during which no shout or other unpleasant tone is heard. People who have
seen him at work say that his face
is lit up, radiant. Sometimes it isn’t even him who photographs, he just stages
every detail and at the right split second he signals to his assistant to
shoot.
Such as “The Last Supper”, a particularly
large photograph – 1.67 m by 2.73 m - which was specially printed in New York.
Its production lasted two years and the cost, which reached $7,000 was made
possible by the prize from the Minister of Science which he received one month
ago.
Nine photographs, simultaneously sharp,
poetic, piercing and soft, were chosen to hang on the walls of the Dvir Gallery
in Tel-Aviv in Nes’ exhibition which will open next Thursday. One photo, I must
admit, had me mesmerized for one long hour. I stared at a soldier dancing alone
in a shaft of light. He is carrying a heavy knapsack on his shoulder. A soldier
on his way home with a backpack full of sweaty clothes, a familiar sight. Nes’
photography removes the picture from its familiar routine, and depicts the
soldier in a private moment, fantastic, lyrical, erotic. A soldier returning home,
marching along an asphalt road, captured in movement by the camera, dancing in
a stream of light, perhaps happy
to be on his way home.
Mesmerized, I asked him what inspired this
photograph, and he answered: “In my youth, I dreamt that I was living with a
traveling circus family and my father was training me to walk a high rope. It
was very scary, and I was walking along the rope and my father said to me in
English: ‘Go straight, go straight’, I can see him standing before me sketching
a straight line in the sand and signaling that I should follow his line.
Straight forward. And I understood that I wasn’t allowed to go left or right
because my father kept telling me to go straight, although he lived in Kiryat
Gat and didn’t speak a word of English. I only understood what he had said
years later. He was telling me not to stray , to walk straight. I had wanted to
walk to the sides, because I understood inside myself that nothing bad would
happen if I did.
And this soldier captured in this beam of
light is in the same situation. He can see only his path, he is a small cog in
the system. He doesn’t want to see more than he sees, he is afraid to look,
because if he does perhaps he won’t be able to continue doing what he is doing,
which is doing what he is told, fulfilling orders, walking straight forward,
not stopping to think or to look sideways”.
This photograph, like the others, was shot
at the end of the day in light which could equally have been at the beginning
of the day, in no place in particular which could equally have been some place
in particular, and the soldiers, like all Nes’ soldiers, are never fighting,
they are caught in a private moment, a moment of relaxation, of fantasy.
Or the next photograph, for example, a
reconstruction of Yossi Ben-Hanan’s famous photograph in the Suez Canal on the
last day of the Six Day War, in which the soldiers jump into the water during a
ceasefire and wave their Kalachnikovs in the air. The story is well-known: a
photographer from Life Magazine was there and in a split second, captured the
picture of the victorious Israeli, which was later published in magazines
throughout the world and became a symbol. Nes looks for one moment longer at
the photograph, for there was also a seventh day to that war, and he depicts
that seventh day in the clenched fists of the soldiers, their faces and muscles
clenched forcefully, violently. This is the other face of the handsome and
victorious Israeli, whose face will be exposed later, when the Kalachnikov is
replaced by an M16, the weapon of the Israeli vanquisher.
Or the next photograph, of five soldiers on
a flagpole. This is originally the famous picture of the raised flag in Um
Rashrash (Eilat) during the war of Independence. In Nes’ interpretation, the
photograph is reconstructed and staged down to the smallest detail: the effort,
the climb up the pole, the desert landscape, the dusty clothes, everything is
in place except that there is no flag. There are no more values, no more
meaning. The action is repeated,
devoid of significance.
Or the photograph of the sleeping soldiers,
tired and asleep in the bus. Their eyes are shut, one of them has a spot on his
upper lip, their heads are fallen, theirs mouths open and their necks bare (for
the slaughter?).
Nes’ view of the soldiers he photographs is
not angry, political, critical. On the contrary, his is a look of yearning,
desire, and mostly compassion. Compassion for youth, for the bursting hormones,
and for the innocence which makes the exploitation possible.
That gentle look, the compassion, I ask him,
the look that neither kicks nor annoys anyone, yet opens a door, where does that come from at such a
young age? Adi Nes smiles. “Look,” he says, “when I came to my mother in Kiryat
Gat, Hanna Nismov, librarian, who gave birth to me after she had two daughters,
and I said to her: ‘Mum, this is
Ilan Sheinfeld, the man I love, and he will be my partner for life’, she looked
at me, smiled and said ‘Good, next week we will make a big dinner for the
entire family, so that everyone can meet your Ilan’, and that is exactly how it
was.
This detail, albeit small, is very
important, and moving in its own way. What the librarian Nismov of Kiryat Gat
had understood is deeply embedded in her son’s photographs. That understanding
which accepts that which we don’t always want to see or hear: mankind contains
all opposites; weakness is embedded in power; as rigid as men may be, deep
intimacy is possible between them; brave and heroic soldiers are at the same
time soft youths, fragile and yearning; all is nature, there is nothing to
fear, nothing to fight; just to understand that beauty, complexity and the
contradictions within, make up the
waters of life itself.