Description
A construction worker holding a horse's face. Behind him is a building apparently under construction and another Tel Aviv building.
Item's history
Artist\Maker historyEphraim Erde was an Israeli photographer and one of the pioneers of photography in Tel Aviv.
He was born in 1905, in a village close to the Ukrainian-Polish border. In 1929, while training in "Hashomer Hatzair"- (The Young Guard), he met a photographer who taught him the secrets of photography. In 1933 he immigrated to Palestine and settled initially in Ein Hamifratz. After a short time he moved to Tel Aviv, where he photographed the residents in the streets of the city. He soon became known as the ''Photographer of Tel Aviv'', a title he retained up to the time that Avraham Soskin became known as such.
Erde opened his first photography studio, "Photo Eden", in Lillienblum Street in Tel Aviv.
In the 1940s he opened a studio in Allenby Street and called it "Photo Erde", this enterprise incorporating also a shop selling photographic equipment.
In the studio courtyard stood a mulberry tree, beneath which Erde carried out much of his portraiture. There he worked until the 1970s, when he closed the studio and moved his large archive to his home in Ben-Zion Boulevard in Tel Aviv.
His photographs covered the fields of sport and dance (for both institutions and private individuals), as well as personages, buildings throughout the country (but especially in Tel Aviv), reproductions for artists, studio portraiture and wedding photographs.
He died in Tel Aviv in 1986, leaving around a million negatives, mainly 35 mm, which were transferred to the municipality of Tel Aviv, together with the rest of his estate. From there the collection was transferred to the Eretz Israel Museum, where it now forms part of the Museum collections.