Catalog of a Collection of Photographs by Gérard Allon in the Judaica Collection of the Harvard library

Allon’s variety of interests is most certainly the result of his moving from
one country to another. Despite the inherent difficulties, migrating to a
new cultural and visual environment broadens one’s horizons and deepens
a person’s understanding of life, thus enriching the creative arsenal.
Besides the revolution of ’68, the general cultural atmosphere of France
of the 1960s and 1970s influenced Allon. The liveliest cultural and
artistic fields at the time were literature (prose and poetry), philosophy,
cinema and theater, and traces of all can clearly be discerned in
Allon’s artistic creations throughout his career. When asked who most
influenced his work and thought, Allon is usually unable to come up
immediately with references, but he then slowly begins to enumerate
names and styles in a variety of domains—Kafka, Borges, Sartre,
Camus, Artaud, Beckett, Ionesco—always adding that these influences
were time-limited or even specific to a certain moment in his life.
These names help explain the surrealistic qualities of many of his creations
in various fields of activity. Naturally, at some point, the young
Gérard did try his hand at writing poetry and short stories, but his
heart has always remained in the realm of the visual. In the strictly
spiritual domain, Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, thought, and ethics
and his humanistic approach to Biblical texts was critical. Levinas’s
writings, along with Gershom Scholem’s work on the Cabala, influenced
Allon to create several thematic series directly connected to Judaism,
such as “Genesis” and the Passover Haggadah.
In painting, Allon cites Goya, Braque, the German Expressionists and
Kiefer, while in cinema he refers to Tarkowsky and Bergman, the years
of Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité, and subsequently Jean-Luc Goddard.
They left a deep imprint on his thought, work, and creation. Several
decades later direct traces of the typical visual vernacular of cinéma
vérité, associated with the more contemporary technologies of video
art, are clearly visible in his 2004 documentary Naomi’s Corset and in
his latest film Fragments.
In the field of photography Allon mentions a long list of artists, many
of them predictable, such as Muybridge, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange,
Bill Brandt, Cartier Bresson, and Robert Frank. Again, each of these
connects to a specific moment in his life and career. However, these
influential photographers were not models that he copied directly.
They were, rather, sounding boards with whom he still conducts a visual,
artistic and creative dialogue. Through staged photography,
which he practiced extensively throughout his practice, Allon came to
appreciate and admire Jeff Wall’s work much later in his career. In fact,
from the very beginning most of Allon’s work is characterized by the
use of photographic “mise en scène,” which is in line with most contemporary
modes of creation in the field. His creations in all fields,
from commercial imagery to personal mystical projects, rely on the
intentional creation of parts of the scene, which are then destroyed
once the set-up has been recorded photographically. What remains is
naturally a “visual memory” fixed in the final image.
Although Allon initially felt very much at ease in France and integrated
into French society, his immigration to Israel at age twenty-four was
to a large extent the result of the disillusionment he felt with what he
calls “the aborted ‘revolution’ of ’68.” It awakened in him difficult questions
of identity. He initially came to Israel to seek distance and gain
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