Tim Gidal (né Ignaz Nachum Gidalewitsch) was born to liberal Orthodox Jewish parents from Russia and Lithuania in Munich, Germany in 1909, where he set himself up as a photojournalist for the renowned photography and press agency Deutscher Photodienst. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936 but, in 1938, he moved to London for two years to work as a photojournalist for the Picture Post. Following his career in Journalism, Gidal became an important scholar of photography and Jewish history in the USA and Israel.
Photographer and art historian Tim Gidal (né Ignaz Nachum Gidalewitsch) was born to liberal Orthodox Jewish parents from Russia and Lithuania in Munich, Germany in 1909. Gidal had strong Zionist convictions from an early age and it is thought that he became involved in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weiss when he was only ten years old (Long, 2011). Gidal’s brother Georg was a photojournalist and, having taken informal photography lessons with him, Gidal worked as a photojournalist for the renowned photography and press agency Deutscher Photodienst (also known as Dephot) from 1929–33, taking photographs for newspapers such as the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. As a photographer, Gidal initially experimented with a range of avant-garde idioms before settling on what he considered to be a more objective style which enabled the personalities and emotions of his subjects to come to the fore. Working for Dephot enabled Gidal to support himself whilst he studied history, art history, and literature at the universities of Munich and Berlin between 1928 and 1931. Gidal then began a doctorate in art history at the University of Munich but left in 1933 because of the growing Nazi presence within the university. He then immigrated to Switzerland to complete his doctorate at the University of Basel, where he wrote his thesis On the Relationship between Image Reporting and the Press.
Gidal received his doctorate in 1935, immigrating to Palestine the following year. On arrival, Gidal produced and directed three short documentary films under the title Eretz Israel, commissioned by the Palestine Film Unit of the Zionist Union for Germany, and which were screened in cinemas throughout Germany, Italy, and France in 1936. He then worked as a freelance foreign correspondent for Reuters-Photos and as a photographer for the Jewish National Fund and the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical Centre. Gidal’s photographs also featured in the celebrated American magazine Life and in several German newspapers. In 1938, Gidal’s series of photographs titled Holy Land appeared in the French magazine Marie-Claire, making him the first photojournalist to publish a photo-essay in colour. In 1938, Gidal decided to move to London, England on the basis of an encouraging telegram he had received from Stefan Lorant, former editor of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse who, having fled Nazi Germany and settled in London in 1934, had founded the Picture Post, an innovative magazine which played an essential role in the development of photojournalism in Britain. Gidal only lived in London for two years but, during this period, he produced more than 40 photostories for Picture Post on subjects ranging from a day in the life of an unemployed person to a day at a beauty school.
Gidal returned to Palestine in 1940 but, soon bored with life in wartime Jerusalem, he joined the Jewish Brigade of the Eighth in 1942 as a photojournalist for Parade, the official army magazine. In this role, Gidal was given the honorary rank of Captain and sent to cover events in North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East. In February 1944, Gidal was sent to Lord Mountbatten’s headquarters in Burma, whereupon he contracted typhus and returned home to Jerusalem. He married the German-Jewish press photographer Sonia Epstein before briefly returning to the army, only to be invalided out again the following year. Life in post-war Palestine was extremely difficult and, following the birth of his son, Gidal decided to pursue a more stable career in academia. Thus, in 1947, the Gidals immigrated to the USA, becoming naturalised citizens in 1953. The family settled in New York where, between 1955 and 1958, Gidal gave lectures on the history of visual communication at the New School for Social Research before acting as an editorial advisor for Life between 1959 and 1964. Gidal lived in the USA for two decades and, during this time, he published numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including a commercially successful series of 23 children’s books which he co-authored with Sonia, and Modern Photojournalism: Origin and Evolution, 1910–1933, a seminal history of the medium which was published in 1958. Gidal and Sonia divorced in 1970 and he returned to Jerusalem, becoming an Israeli citizen in 1975. He joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s communications department in 1971 and, from then onwards, his scholarship focused almost exclusively on the Jewish history of the Holy Land, Near East, and Germany. Gidal received numerous awards and, in 1992, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Britain’s Royal Photographic Society. His work has been the subject of several exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Gidal died in Jerusalem in 1996. His work is held in public collections in the UK, including the National Portrait Gallery, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The National Art Library at the V&A holds the Osman-Gidal archive of photojournalism.