Micha Bar-Am's remarkable documentation of the 1967 Six-Day War
Micha Bar Am
"If you're too close to events, you lose perspective. It is not easy to be fair with the facts and keep your own convictions out of the picture. It is almost impossible to be both a participant in the events and their observer, witness, interpreter"
- Micha Bar Am
Micha Bar-Am has been a Magnum Correspondent since 1968. He was born in Berlin in 1930 and moved with his family to Israel, then Palestine, in 1936.
Growing up in Haifa, Bar-Am lived on a kibbutz and began to document kibbutz life with borrowed cameras. Active in the pre-state underground, Bar-Am was drafted in 1948 when the Jewish-Arab conflict turned into all-out war. After his military service, he had several jobs before he began to photograph seriously, covering the 1956 Sinai War.
After the publication of his first book, Across Sinai, Bar-Am was asked to join the editorial staff of the Israeli Army magazine Bamachane, where he worked as a photographer and writer for the next eight years. In 1959 and 1960 he was awarded the Robert Capa Award. He began freelancing in 1966 and covered the Six-Day War in 1967.
In the mid-1960s, Bar-Am curated several exhibits and books with Cornell Capa, including Israel: The Reality. He assisted Capa with the establishment of the International Center for Photography in 1974 and became an active curator. From 1977 to 1993, he was the curator of photography at the Tel Aviv Museum. His reportages on Israel have been published in a large number of magazines and books.
