Pour nos yeux

Looking for Zion is a journey I embark on following the photographs of my grandfather, Ephraim Erde, a famous Zionist photographer from the 1930s.
This journey reveals to me new ideas about his choices and image-making, which are leading me to question and critically examine the history of the Israeli society and the Zionist dream in the past and in the present, as they are reflected from the confrontation of the visuals of my grandfather and through my lens today.
In 1933, Ephraim emigrated from Poland to Israel (then Palestine, under the British mandate) and began to restlessly document the realization of the Zionist dream, becoming the official photographer of the governing socialist party, the Kiboutzs and the workers movement. I, his granddaughter, was born in the country which its establishment he has documented.
In this film I decide to follow my grandfather’s vision through his photographs, and to examine the imagery of Israel through both our eyes: his and mine. By doing so I hope to better understand the evolution of his dream, its turning points and mistakes and to be able to imagine a different possible future today.
The stories that come up from the photographs are interlacing the family, intimate side and the national, collective aspect, which remains in the centre, yet receives new lights and clues from the revelations and understandings I collect about my family and my grandfather’s life course and choices. The huge gap between those two visual worlds, of past and present, of his and mine, are raising many questions about the evolution of Israel and the critical turning points in its history. This gap between our two visual worlds brings us to interrogate the act of photography itself as well: what is included and what is left out of the frame? In what way do ideology and political vision change and shape the photographer’s work? And what role does image-making play in the creation of a nation?
In that gap between his images and mine, between what I learn about his life story and ideas and the images he had left behind, I wish to examine the story of my homeland from a new perspective: that of the image and the ability of the image to shape and transform the reality it reflects.