Alex Levac

Alex Levac was born in Tel Aviv.[1] He graduated from Tel Aviv University in 1967 with a degree in philosophy and psychology.[1] In late 1967, he left Israel for London intending to stay for one year; he remained for fourteen years.[3] During that period, he studied photography and worked in the field in Britain.[3]

In London, Levac developed an aesthetic approach shaped by the work of Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and especially British photographer Tony Ray-Jones, whose interest in finding visual overlaps resonated with him.[3] After returning to Israel, he said he became drawn to street contrasts because he knew the culture and its visual language well enough to read them.[3] He recalled taking one of his first photographs in this style in Ashkelon, where he noticed unexpected contrasts coming together on the street.[3]

Levac joined the newspaper Hadashot after returning to Israel and established a regular column in its Segol supplement, whose visually oriented editors gave photographers substantial space to work.[3] He later held a weekly photography slot that he described, at the time of a 2025 interview, as spanning roughly forty years.[3] His candid street photographs had also appeared in Haaretz for more than three decades, in regular sections titled "Our Land" and "The 21st Century."[3][2]

His career-defining moment came early: only a few months into his tenure at Hadashot, Levac photographed one of the terrorists who hijacked Bus 300 alive and being led away after the Israeli army’s 1984 rescue operation.[3][5] The image contradicted the initial official report that all four Palestinian terrorists had been killed when soldiers stormed the bus.[3] It helped expose that Shin Bet personnel had killed two terrorists after the operation; the resulting scandal led to the resignation of the head of the Shin Bet and upheaval within the organization.[4] Hadashot was temporarily shut down following publication of the photograph.[3] Levac later said the scoop made him feel "like the king of the world," while also leaving him uncertain where he could go professionally after such an early breakthrough.[5]

He covered the entire First Intifada and the early phase of the Second Intifada, during which a stray bullet grazed his forehead.[5] After his partner urged him to choose between her and continuing that work, he decided the risk was not worth it and shifted his focus to Israeli street life.[5] Among his notable images from that period is a photograph of an IDF soldier patrolling 1980s Bethlehem with a rifle and a broom strapped to his back. The soldier had been ordered to carry it all day by his commander as punishment for not cleaning the army tent.[6] Local children asked Levac: "Hey! Is that your secret weapon?"[6]

Levac described his approach to photography as interpretive rather than purely documentary: "Although I document reality, photography isn’t objective. A photographer also documents what is happening inside him, his interpretation of things."[5] He looks for humorous images and unconventional juxtapositions, and has argued that a genuinely good photograph cannot be staged because awareness of the camera changes the situation.[5] He said of his working method: "I see things as if through a filter. The choice of the particular moment is mine."[7]

Asked in a 2025 interview whether smartphones had made street photography harder, Levac replied that they had done the opposite: because everyone now takes pictures, people notice him less, giving him greater freedom to shoot.[3] His weekly output varies—sometimes he finds a strong image quickly, while at other times he returns without having taken one.[3]

Levac’s photography books include An Eye for Zion (עין לציון), Tel Aviv Serenade (סרנדה תל-אביבית)—pairing poems by Nathan Alterman with his photographs—Our Land (הארץ שלנו), Like a Dog (כמו כלב), and Israel: The 21st Century (ישראל: המאה ה-21).[2] He also provided the photographs for the 2003 Hebrew-language cookbook Sherry Ansky—Food, a 296-page illustrated volume published by Keter in Jerusalem.[8]

In collaboration with hi-tech entrepreneur and amateur photographer Gadi Royz, Levac co-produced A City of Refuge, a collection of approximately one hundred prints depicting Tel Aviv and centering on unexpected visual combinations in everyday settings; Royz contributed around forty prints.[3] Levac said he agreed to the collaboration after viewing Royz’s photographs and finding them compelling.[3]

For the 2009 project and exhibition "Child, Home, Light," Levac visited Or Shalom foster homes to photograph children and their lives there, with his images shown alongside pictures taken by the children themselves—young people who had been removed from their biological homes by welfare authorities.[9] Because the children’s identities had to remain confidential, Levac could not photograph their faces, a constraint he described as frustrating: "A human story without a face already starts at a disadvantage, like running 100 meters on one leg."[9]

In 2012, a selection of his street photographs was shown in the exhibition "The Paparazzi of the Anonymous" at the Apter-Barrer Center for the Arts in Ma’alot-Tarshiha.[7] In June 2023, an exhibition titled "Alone Together" was mounted at the Van Leer Institute, featuring photographs of the separation fence alongside commentaries from Israeli, Palestinian, and Jerusalem public and intellectual figures.[10]

In 2023, Google Arts & Culture presented "The Wanderer," a digital solo exhibition produced in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and curated by Raz Samira.[11] The exhibition featured twenty-two photographs taken between 1986 and 2022, selected from more than four hundred images Levac submitted; the interactive format allowed visitors to move through virtual museum rooms, and some images were accompanied by Levac narrating anecdotes about them.[11] He described his self-understanding as a photographer in the exhibition: "I see myself as a researcher, as a historian in miniature, a collector of evidence in the space of Israeli existence."[11]

A 2020 exhibition titled "Yesh Matzav" presented twenty-four photographs selected from the tens of thousands Levac had taken over fifty years.[4]

Levac received the Ministry of Education and Culture Photography Prize in 2003, the Israel Prize in Photography in 2005, and the Israel Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.[2] A photograph from February 2005 held in the National Library of Israel shows Levac alongside Micha Bar Am and David Rubinger at the opening of a Bar Am photography exhibition, with all three identified in the catalogue as "leading Israeli press photographers."[12]

Levac distinguished the officials who presented the Israel Prize from those who selected him, noting in a statement: "although the prize was given to me by the officialdom, they are not the ones who choose me."[13]

In December 2014, Levac and Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy were reportedly briefly detained by the Israeli army and questioned at a checkpoint in the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria—while attempting to re-enter Israel.[14] Haaretz characterized the detention as an attempt to undermine journalists’ work; soldiers alleged that the two journalists verbally abused and spat on security officers, allegations both journalists denied.[14]

In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled against Levac in a privacy case arising from a photograph he had taken of Menashe Dror Tzadik, an ultra-Orthodox man selling religious books near Dizengoff Center.[15] Tzadik had objected to being photographed, and Levac had promised the images were for personal use only; one was later published in his newspaper column.[15] The court found that this promise constituted an oral agreement not to publish and that its breach violated Tzadik’s privacy, ordering Levac, Haaretz, and former editor Hanoch Marmari to pay NIS 30,000.[15] Justice Eliezer Rivlin noted that, absent the promise, freedom of expression would have prevailed over the privacy claim.[15]

A separate lawsuit was filed in 2016 against Levac and Haaretz over a photograph taken at the Mount Meron Lag BaOmer celebration and published in his "The 21st Century" column.[2] The plaintiffs, parents of two minor girls, alleged that the image violated privacy and humiliated the subjects; Levac and Haaretz defended it as direct documentary photography of a public event serving the public interest.[2] No outcome was reported in the available coverage.