Chapter 11. “Days of Sun, Playing, and Dreams”

Abstract

After a brief overview of children’s photography books in Israel, this chapter focuses on photobooks that were shot in the kibbutzim. Created mostly by local photographers with an insider’s gaze, these books embody the vision of childhood in a rural, parentless environment protected from the fate of the Oedipal fall and the perils of a changing society. While promoting the vision of the kibbutz by documenting children’s everyday life, some of these books tap into the loss and deprivation in the realized utopia of the kibbutz. The three case studies discussed in the chapter, published between 1961–1968, present various interactions between photographer and writer, images and words, that yielded intricate messages. An analysis of them shows how this variant of the photobook exploited the qualities of the medium and the genre, which combine realism and nostalgia, in order to reveal the underlying tensions in the kibbutz’s vision and way of life.