Yael Rozen

For a full decade Yael was the house photographer of the monthly “At” and of Ma’ariv’s weekend supplements, while also shooting for IBM’s “Machshavot”, edited by Tzvi Yanai, for the Dutch magazine Panorama and for the Jewish Chronicle. The photography researchers Guy Raz and Noa Tzadka count her among the pioneers of magazine photography in Israel.

She photographed people at home, against the surroundings in which they lived and worked: Naomi Shemer, Yona Wallach, Dalia Ravikovitch, Jacqueline Kahanoff, a young Ofra Haza with her parents in the HaTikva neighbourhood, the Herzog and Kishon families. Between assignments she wandered the streets with the camera: Dizengoff, Kassit, the California café, street fashion and the daily life of a city that no longer exists.

In 1977 she won the international Anna Riwkin-Brick Prize for photography and held a solo show at Beit Sokolov. A year later, in “Five Points of View” at the Tel Aviv Artists’ House, she exhibited alongside Aliza Auerbach, Rachel Hirsch and Ronit Shani. Guy Raz has written that the show was a significant turning point for women photographers in Israel.

The 1970s negatives did not stay in a drawer. They served documentary films and series on Yona Wallach, Dan Ben-Amotz, Naomi Shemer, Dalia Ravikovitch, Ofra Haza and Shlomo Artzi, Channel 1’s “Fashion Dictate” and Channel 8’s “Tel Aviv–Jaffa”. In 2008 she showed “In the Streets of Tel Aviv in the 70s” at the Sonia Getzel Shapira café gallery.

Around 2020 the media professional Kobi Albaz discovered the archive, and from it came “The Perfect Match – when the 70s met Tel Aviv” at Kiosko in Florentin and, in the summer of 2021, “Dizengoff in Black and White”: 46 photographs hung in Dizengoff Square and along the street itself, where they were taken. That year she also showed at the Nahum Gutman Museum in “All the Happy Families”, and two years earlier in “Pioneers of Photography” at the international photography festival.