May 2, 2008 11:58

A Life In Israel

With Israel celebrating its 60th anniversary of independence this month, I wanted to add my two cents to Tim McGirk's wonderful tribute to TIME Photographer David Rubinger. If you haven't seen Tim's piece or David's photo essay, 60 Years of Israel, check them out here and here. Nor can I resist plugging David's new book, Israel Through My Lens: Sixty Years As a Photojournalist.

David Rubinger: "60 Years of Israel"

David, now 83, a Vienna native who fled to British-occupied Palestine in 1939 after Hitler annexed Austria, is a legend in Israel and in the world of photojournalism. He along with his beloved late wife Anni, a researcher, have been pillars of TIME's foreign reporting staff for something like a half century. The occasions I've had to cover Israel are among the most rewarding professional experiences I've had especially for the chance to hang out--and learn from-- David and Anni, a Holocaust survivor. They could tell you the history of the birth and development of Israel as if they were fascinating personal stories; for them, they were.

There's no better history of Israel's six decades than David's vast archive of photographs. He's been a powerful and compassionate witness to all of it. Shimon Peres calls him "the photographer of the nation in the making." He's covered all the wars, the lives of statesmen and the triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people. He snapped David Ben-Gurion at the front and Golda Meir in her kitchen. You can't help be moved, whether you're Israeli or not, by one of his most famous pictures, the portrait of the three young Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall after capturing the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. David was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize in 1997 for his contributions to Israeli society.

Apologies for the cliche, but on top of it David's a star who's also a great guy. Humanity oozes out of him. David not only seems to know everybody in Israel, but he has their cell phone number. One of the last times I worked with him, in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, we were spending some time over lunch or something. He noticed that I had been taking some happy snaps with my pocket camera so he spent the meal giving me a tutorial about how to improve my images.

I remember how delighted David seemed to be when I suddenly came back with a small scoop of my own one day: a photograph of the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abul Abbas (of Achille Lauro notoriety) reading an Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post. This was well before I ever discovered digital, and David insisted on taking my film all the way back to Jerusalem, developing it in the darkroom himself, and transmitting an image to New York.

That's a little story about David Rubinger.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo