This beautiful volume is the fruit of almost 40 years of collecting by Vivienne Silver-Brody, one of Israel's few photography collectors. She has written and edited a book, which narrates the shared history of photography in a land that in the last century has seen development alongside war and destruction, and that remains divided and conflicted by the two peoples that call it home. The text is accompanied by some 200 exquisite photographs from Silver-Brody’s collection, and includes a special section inspired by the 1983 volume published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Personal Choice: A Celebration of Twentieth-Century Photographs . In this section, Silver-Brody invited some 60 writers – photographers, scholars, artists, curators, collectors, lovers of photography and others with a special connection to the land – from different religions, national and political tendencies, to choose a single photograph from her collection and to write a short essay relating to it. The result is a fascinating selection of texts that contributes to the overall narrative in the book. This book could speak to a diversified readership; those interested in photography and its history or in the Middle East and Israel / Palestine, especially in light of the ongoing conflict and public debate surrounding it around the world, and in light of the unique voice that attempts to reach beyond politics and religion, and to present a photographic history of the Land of Israel as a shared place rather than as disputed territory. Translated by Daphna Levy View English edition

The photographs, fragile mirrors to the past, testify to a moment when a nascent society set in motion utopian ideas that were to lead towards institutions of contemporary Israeli society. They project an assortment of old Yishuv and new Zionist lifestyles, village society, the beginnings of the Kibbutz, labor battalions, the guarding of settlements, development of agriculture and land reclamation, construction of roads, the growth of new cities, immigration and community welfare. The book is divided into general introductory chapters, concluding with the biographies and works of ten photographers dating from the turn of the twentieth century to 1993 when a new wave of immigration was to change the prevailing aesthetic Israel Studies in Historical Geography Series