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Part of
Photography in Children's Literature
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 17] 2023
► pp. 254–273

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

Innocence, loss, and nostalgia in photography books of children in the kibbutz

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.

Article outline
  • Introduction and overview: Children’s photobooks in Israel
  • Realism and nostalgia in photobooks and photography
  • The kibbutz’s photobooks
  • A reading of three kibbutz photobooks
  • “Mommy does not answer” – A family pastoral in Eti and Na’ama
  • “A bad deed”: Into the wild in A Journey to the Land of Rain
  • “And I was that girl” – Lilach of Kibbutz Ilanot and the story of the photographed child
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.17.11ami
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