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

In the introduction to the Passover Haggadah published in 1982
Allon wrote:
The Passover Haggada has existed for thousands of years and
usually appears accompanied by drawings and pictures.
These aid in creating an actualization of the Hebrew Exodus
from Egypt in each generation; a physical, moreover a mental
and spiritual liberation which we must . . . undergo anew
every year.
During the work, there appeared a possibility of a photographic
exegesis and its language was based on primary
forms: circle, square, triangle . . . , and basic colours. Usage of
their meaning stems from the knowledge of the Kabbalah.
In every shape, in every colour there is essence.
In the fall of the same year, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, organized a
major exhibition titled Here and Now: Israeli Art, which included painting,
sculpture, drawing, photography, and video. This was an extensive
survey of the condition of the arts in the country, and Gérard Allon was
one of the fourteen photographers chosen as representative of the most
innovative and up-to-date approaches in the medium. Selected for the exhibition
was the series of ten photographs from the Passover Haggadah
illustrating the ten plagues of Egypt (Figure 10).
The catalogue of the exhibition referred to Allon’s work in these terms:
Gérard Allon is the only photographer in the exhibition who
attempts to avoid the beaten path. Almost totally free of any
foreign influences, he aims to produce images derived directly
from Jewish heritage. His photographs, a series of illustrations
for a recently published Passover Haggada,
combine a two-millennia-old subject with a very modern visual
idiom: color photography. This unusual mixture, together
with the use of Kabalistic signs and symbols, results in
a unique series of abstract images. Even more surprising is
the use of violent colors reminiscent of Punk aesthetic, and
Figure 10: Hoshekh (Darkness, The Ten Plagues), from Hagadah shel Pesah
(Passover Haggadah), 1982.
its associations with such a subject. Allon’s modern photographic
mysticism and his effort to combine old and new
might be seen as a solitary attempt in the search for a local
character in Israeli photography.
In spite of the unusual character of his work and art, and its dissimilarity
with current photographic practices in the country, Allon has
been embraced by the museum and art worlds as being one of the representatives
of new Israeli photography.
An avid experimenter and seeker after new tools to enlarge his creative
arsenal, Allon embraced the new science of holography in the early
1980s. In applying it in his art he pioneered an almost futurist mode
of imagery that verges on science fiction. The groundbreaking images
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