Alexander (Alex) Libak

Alexander (Alex) Libak, born in Tel Aviv on June 23, 1944, is one of the Israeli photographers most closely associated with direct, humane, and sometimes ironic observation of society. For decades, he has photographed people, places, and fleeting situations that do not always enter official histories but together reveal the face of Israel: its streets, margins, public spaces, poverty, chance encounters, and the small gestures of daily life.

Libak did not treat photography solely as gallery art. During the 1980s and 1990s, his photographs appeared in regular columns in the newspapers Chadashot and Haaretz, helping establish photography as an independent journalistic and publicistic medium. His images offered readers more than visual information. They provided a way to understand Israeli reality through glances, postures, encounters, and situations that cannot easily be translated into words.

From a First Camera to the Wider World

Libak grew up in Tel Aviv. His father, Moshe Libak, immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1922 and established a textile business. He was also an amateur photographer who photographed, among other subjects, British soldiers and developed his pictures in an improvised darkroom in a souvenir shop at the Kastina junction. When Alex was 15 or 16, his father gave him his first camera, a Brownie. That gift began an artistic and professional journey combining anthropological curiosity, street photography, and journalism.

In 1967, Libak completed studies in psychology and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He then traveled to Brazil aboard the ship Theodor Herzl, spending nine months there alongside the anthropologist Antonio Suarez. During that period, he began photographing local residents and their surroundings. The experience deepened his interest in people and social environments, an interest that would remain at the center of his work after his return to Israel.

He later studied at a photography school in London and worked as a photographer for the BBC with the assistance of one of his teachers. During the 1970s, he moved between Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, and Los Angeles. In England, he exhibited photographs of daily life in the town of Wolverton. In London, he documented the punk rock scene and the Skinheads phenomenon at football matches. In Hollywood, he worked for two years as a stills photographer on film productions. At the University of Berkeley, he presented an exhibition about Indigenous life in the Amazon, and at the Zuny Gallery in San Francisco he exhibited street photographs from Brazil. These experiences gave him international perspective while sharpening his interest in the local, the immediate, and the unscripted.

The Israeli Street as a Journalistic Arena

Libak returned to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. In 1981, he and his wife came to Ashkelon to document a neighborhood rehabilitation project. At the beginning of his professional career in Israel, he combined practical photographic work with a commitment to social documentation. He used the laboratory facilities of a wedding-photography studio in exchange for photographing two weddings each week. That same year, he began working with journalist Rino Tzror at Anashim, later moving with him to Chadashot.

At these newspapers, Libak developed the style that became his signature: direct, unposed photography that seeks the moment when reality reveals itself. He looked for the tension between private and public life, seriousness and absurdity, and an ordinary image's wider social meaning. His photographs do not merely record events; they show how people live within events, institutions, and social processes.

One of his best-known images is the photograph known as “Line 300,” taken in April 1984 and published in Chadashot. It shows Shin Bet agents leading away one of the hijackers of Bus 300 while he was still alive. The photograph became a central journalistic document associated with the Line 300 affair and demonstrated how a single image can pose a public question to an entire system. Its importance lay not only in the event it recorded, but also in the fact that it gave readers direct visual evidence at a moment when official versions and photographed reality did not coincide.

After Chadashot closed in 1993, Libak joined Haaretz as a permanent contributor. In his columns “Our Land” and “The 21st Century,” he continued documenting Israeli society in all its variety. In 2005, he photographed a series for the newspaper about poverty in Israel, directing attention toward people and places that public life often fails to see. His work for Haaretz continued even after he was laid off in 2010, two years before his planned retirement.

Books, Teaching, and a Sustained Body of Work

Libak has published five photography books, each presenting a different aspect of his work. Eye for Zion, edited by David Tartakover, places his photography within a broad visual account of Israel. Tel Aviv Serenade combines poems by Nathan Alterman with Libak’s photographs. Our Land gathers his journalistic work. Like a Dog, published by Keter, is devoted entirely to photographs of dogs. Israel: The Twenty-First Century offers a visual record of a society changing rapidly.

Alongside his work in newspapers and books, Libak lectures at a social-economic college and teaches street and documentary photography, including courses with Felix Lupa. He passes on more than photographic technique. He teaches a professional ethic of attentiveness: to observe the immediate environment, listen to people, and recognize a broad social story within an apparently ordinary moment.

In 2014, an exhibition of rare photographs documented the lives and natural surroundings of children with cancer, in cooperation with the Chaim Association. The project extended the perspective familiar from his street photography—from the newspaper and public square to intimate and vulnerable experience, where photography becomes a means of presence, recognition, and preserving memory.

Photography, Privacy, and Creative Freedom

Libak’s work also contributed to a public and legal discussion about what may be photographed and published in a public space. In 2002, he was sued after a photograph he had taken in a public place was published in his “Our Land” column. The case moved through several courts, and in 2008 the Supreme Court left the compensation award in place, basing its decision on Libak’s breach of a promise not to publish the photograph. The case illustrated the continuing tension between freedom of expression and creation on one hand and the right to privacy on the other—a tension that remains central to photojournalism in the digital age.

The case matters because it touches the heart of Libak’s method: photographing people as they appear in shared public space, without staging them and without separating their lives from the social context in which they exist. His work reminds us that photojournalism is both an artistic act and a public act, with consequences for those photographed as well as for those who look.

Professional and National Recognition

Libak received the Rita Poratzi Prize for photography from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1993, the Ministry of Education and Culture Photography Award in 2003, and the Israel Museum Award for lifetime achievement in 2013. In 2005, he was awarded the Israel Prize in Photography.

The Israel Prize committee described him as a photographer deeply rooted in the Israeli experience, with an original, penetrating, and at times ironic vision of reality, and with the ability to observe the fleeting gestures of the Israeli street with empathy and poetic insight. This recognition reflected the place that street photography had achieved in Israeli culture and the value of visual journalism that takes small, unfamiliar moments as seriously as major public events.

Why Alex Libak Merits an Important Place in Moreshet

Alex Libak merits inclusion in Moreshet because, over many decades, he transformed everyday life in Israel into a significant visual record. His photographs preserved moments, people, and places that might otherwise disappear from collective memory, while teaching broad audiences to look at Israeli society with critical intelligence, humanity, and complexity. From “Line 300” to his series on poverty, children with cancer, and the Israeli street, he showed how a single image can document reality, stimulate public conversation, and change the way a society sees itself.

His influence is also evident in the standing he gave to journalistic and documentary photography in Israel, in his books, in his teaching, and in the generations of photographers who have drawn inspiration and practical knowledge from his work. For Moreshet, an archive devoted to people who shaped Israeli society, culture, and memory, Libak is a central figure. He did not merely photograph Israeli history; he helped determine which moments entered public awareness and how they would be remembered. His place on Moreshet.com therefore rests on a sustained body of work that influenced journalism, visual culture, and the way Israelis understand their shared lives.