At no point early in his life did Alex Levac think that photography was his calling. He surely never imagined that he would study photography because of an antisemitic yacht owner who threatened him with a gun.

Well, the backstory starts in 1967. Fresh out of university, the 23-year-old Levac dreamed of Jules Verne-style adventures. He boarded a ship, sailed to Brazil and with an anthropologist friend took photos of Indigenous tribes in the Amazon. The friend did the writing, and Levac – still an amateur – handled the camera. From there it was another journey by ship, to Portugal.

While dreaming that maybe the camera would let him keep traveling forever, he arrived in Lisbon and found himself on a yacht whose owner decided to sail the globe. Levac tagged along.

“But this guy quickly proved to be quite the lunatic,” he smiles. “We did a tour around Morocco and Yemen, and then he just tossed me ashore in Gibraltar. He took out a rifle, started firing in the air, cursed the Jews and threw me off the boat. That’s how I found myself in Gibraltar with 30 British pounds in my pocket, trying to figure out what I was going to do.”

Thirty pounds was also the price at which the British air force was offering night flights to London, where Levac stayed for a month or two with Boaz Davidson, a childhood friend who had just started film school there.

“At some point he told me, ‘Why don’t you stay here and study photography?’” Levac says. “So I went to study photography, completely by chance.”

Over five decades later, and by no chance at all, Levac is considered one of Israel’s leading stills photographers. He has been a celebrity since 1984, when a picture of his in the newspaper Hadashot roiled the country. The photo showed members of the Shin Bet security service leading one of the captured hijackers of a bus – after the agency had said the hijackers had been killed in the freeing of the passengers. Actually, they were executed shortly after the photo was taken. This is what Israelis call the Bus 300 affair.

Levac has developed a unique photographic language that he has been sharing for over three decades in his weekly column in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition. He captures a piece of the local reality that might seem banal at first, but it often reveals cracks in Israeli society. In 2005 Levac became one of only four people to win the Israel Prize for photography.

In a weekly feature that also runs in English, “The Twilight Zone,” he visits the West Bank with Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy to document the iniquities of the occupation. Even today, at 78, you’ll rarely catch Levac without a camera.

He has long since stopped doing news photography, not that he’s out of the loop. In recent weeks he has visited the protests against the Netanyahu government’s attempts to weaken the judiciary, hoping for a choice shot, maybe with a touch of humor.

And at one of the demonstrations it happened: boys kissing a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu displayed on one of their phones, as a large poster of Theodor Herzl – the celebrated visionary of a Jewish state – looks on. The image appeared in Levac’s weekly column.

“That’s what I look for, that combination of elements,” Levac says. “It doesn’t always work out.”

He has accumulated thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of photos over the years, and they’re still piling up. But those that are particularly important to him are the ones that capture the evanescent reality [in Israel] into a framed composition. “It’s very important to me to be connected to what’s happening, and not to take pictures of landscapes and things like that,” he explains.

“What’s important to me is the documentation of our lives, how we look,” he says and immediately afterwards provides a key to viewing his huge body of work.

The late journalist Amos Elon, he says, once told him something that was thoroughly etched in him and has been reverberating for years. “He told me, ‘Alex, listen, you have to photograph the end of this country, its requiem.’ I asked him how I can do that, and he said, ‘Continue to do what you’re doing, but always think about that direction, about how this place is slowly but surely disappearing, changing, turning into something else.’

“He said that to me 30 years ago, and since then it’s become a kind of mantra for me,” says Levac. “So it’s not that I go to a demonstration with an intention of photographing it, but I think that subconsciously I’m always looking for that. I don’t say, ‘Oh, here’s a picture that points to the requiem.’ But when I look at pictures of mine years later, I see that there’s a certain sequence, a documentation of disasters, a story of a certain decadence, of a change that’s taking place here, and not in a positive sense.”

Graphic designer David Tartakover, a friend of Levac’s who has edited two of his books, says that he is “among the few people I knew who goes to work in the street every day. He has a weekly deadline, and the street is his studio. He doesn’t stage things, but rather he records from his point of view. He’s a great humanist, and that’s reflected in the photos of course.

“When you walk in the street with him, you’re both at the same angle, the same point of view, but he sees the thing that’s unusual, that stands out and that’s exceptional. Alex is like the body camera worn by policemen, which records everything they see, but from a very original point of view. And of course he is politically aware, in two election campaigns he appeared on the Meretz slate of Knesset candidates, and that’s a statement.”

Projecting yourself onto a photo

The tight connection between Levac’s work and the Israeli story is also evident in the new Hebrew-language documentary “Alex’s Group,” which explores the power of visual images. In Yonatan Nir’s film, debuting in Israel on Yes Docu on Memorial Day, Levac, psychiatrist Adi Doron and photo therapist Essie Haus provide photo therapy for people battling combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder. Some are suffering because of the struggles of a loved one like a partner, father or son.

Levac helps them discuss the pain. They look at his photos, pick one that touches them personally, and explain their choice and their trauma. We see men and women, religious and secular, people from the center of the country and people from the outskirts as the PTSD seeps from the personal to the national.

“I entered their world,” Levac says. “I had no idea what these people go through day after day, hour by hour. I don’t know how significant my contribution was, but a group dynamic developed. Photography opened them up. … Suddenly I realized how much power a photograph has.

“In the workshop I realized the extent to which people can project something of themselves onto a photo, so it becomes something that’s theirs, depending on what they see.”

The confessions in the film are poignant, to say the least.

“Outside they look like you and me, but what they go through every moment of their lives is unbelievable,” Levac says. “And it’s also unbelievable that our society doesn’t really address it at all.”

He mentions, Itzik Saidian, who has been suffering from PTSD since he fought in the 2014 Gaza war. In 2021 he set himself on fire in front of the Defense Ministry.

Levac says Saidian “had to burn himself alive to bring awareness to it, even though his injury is, after all, a direct result of how we live here. We as a society forced these people into these traumatic situations, and now we don’t do enough to help them get out of it.”

In the film you also talk about your own trauma, how during your military service you played Russian roulette with friends, one of whom shot himself. You say that your entire attitude toward guns and the army changed.

“I’m not comparing that to the trauma of the people who took part in the workshop; it doesn’t affect me the same way. … But yes, occasionally I go back to that. The guy who shot himself was a good friend of mine, and that really changed everything for me. I was discharged from the army early because of that. … I actually wanted to be a combat soldier. But after that story my romance with the army was over.”

You’ve certainly photographed your share of military situations, weapons, violence and killing; how has this affected you?

“These things are part of you even if you aren’t aware of them. I’m obsessed with taking pictures of people in the street with guns. Israel is the only country in the world where you see people walking around with guns so much, and not necessarily soldiers; civilians too.”

Do you feel you’re already at the end stage?

“Yes, to a certain degree.”

What do you think is the most significant thing you’re leaving behind?

“I’d like people to view my pictures as a kind of puzzle, lots of pieces that together create a picture of Israeliness as I see it. Aside from aesthetics and composition, photography has to add value, some kind of statement. I hope that anyone who looks at my pictures will understand how I see things here – with a bit of humor and a bit of sadness.”

All of us near death

Levac was born in Tel Aviv in 1944 and studied at the Tel Nordau School there. After the army he studied philosophy and psychology at Tel Aviv University, then came his worldwide travels and study in London.

In 1981, after 14 years around the world, he returned to Israel. He settled in Ashkelon on the southern coast, took pictures of an urban renewal project and moonlighted by photographing weddings and doing public relations jobs.

He also occasionally took photos for the monthly Monitin and the weekly Anashim. When he was offered a full-time job at the daily Hadashot he took the plunge.

“The truth is, I was a bit afraid because in this work you have responsibility and you’re judged every day,” he says. “Every day they look at your pictures and say that you’re a good photographer or that you’re not good. Every day you have to rethink. To this day I get nervous about that.”

In addition to his Israel Prize, he has won awards from the then-Education and Culture Ministry, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum. He has published books and staged exhibitions, and he lectures on photography and leads workshops.

There’s a contradiction between the awards and honors showered on him and his modesty and self-criticism. For example, he doesn’t deny the issues with “The Twilight Zone.”

“The problem with this column, as Gideon says, is that nobody reads it, and anybody who actually does read it doesn’t pay much attention to it. I can understand that, because how much can you read about the injustices of the occupation?” he says.

“We go there every week and each time we encounter that experience of bereavement, of these people’s pain, and there’s no burnout because each time it’s strong and affects me and I want others to read it. But it’s repetitious. That’s the banality of death, of the occupation; it’s no longer interesting no matter how well you write, no matter how good the photo is.”

It’s been many years since you were a news photographer, but in the film you tell the people in the workshop about that period of your career, about how you would arrive at the scene of a disaster and find yourself searching the horror for the aesthetic of a shot.

“That happens a lot to photojournalists. I’m not the only one who tries, from the suffering, pain and disaster, to create an attractive shot, which is absurd. But apparently it’s unavoidable. You don’t tell yourself: ‘Okay, it’s a terrible event, I’ll take an ugly shot.’ No, because you want to show how good you are.”

In a combat zone or the aftermath of a terror attack or disaster, there’s greater potential for a strong shot.

“True. But when I got home I’d suddenly think about what I saw and how I took a picture, how I climbed a tree to get a better shot of people who were blown up half an hour earlier. The worst was at funerals, because everybody shot close-ups of family members at the grave, especially during the Lebanon war.

“And then the Press Council decided that there would be no more close-ups at open graves, but this lasted a day or two, because the editors said, ‘We need strong shots of people crying,’ and then everybody starting taking pictures again.

“I remember that a bus was blown up in Jerusalem, and I went with a few photographers to a nearby balcony, looked around and suddenly saw limbs hanging on a tree – a hand, a finger. I started shooting that and then said, ‘Enough, I can’t do this.’ And I stopped right then. But as you say, the strongest news photos are full of blood, sweat and tears.”

Why is that?

“I’ve thought about that many times, and I think it’s the proximity to death. After all, we all die at some point, and photos like that bring us a little closer to that moment.

“Once I was in a car with [journalist] Zvi Gilat on a day of demonstrations, shooting and deaths in the village of Anabta near Tul Karm [in the West Bank] in 1988. We were stopped, and I said, ‘Wow, now they’re going to mow us down.’ But no, they pulled me out of the car and said, ‘Photograph this,’ and I took a picture [of two Palestinians who had been killed]. And because I was standing in front of the light, a picture came out that, in terms of lighting, is a bit Rembrandt.”

But your most famous picture was actually taken when the person was still alive, a moment before they killed him. The photo of the terrorist from the Bus 300 affair revealed a hidden truth. That’s the dream of every photojournalist.

“Suddenly I became famous. Suddenly everybody knew who Alex Levac was. That was very flattering. You know, a scoop is a scoop; there aren’t many scoops in photography, especially one that changed the Shin Bet [security service] and caused a crisis in the government. To this day they teach it at university, and the Shin Bet even invited me a few times to lecture about it.

“So yes, it made me famous, but there’s always the fear that you’ll be remembered as a one-picture photographer. Some people say, ‘How much money did you get for that, you traitor?’ And others say, ‘Good for you for shooting that.’ But I shot it simply because I was there. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t know what I would be shooting. I didn’t even know that I was taking a picture of one of the guys who hijacked the bus. I had absolutely no idea.

“Today a photo like that wouldn’t receive such coverage, it wouldn’t cause an uproar. Back then society was different. Whenever a Palestinian was wounded by a soldier’s fire, it would be investigated.”