Iconic Tel Aviv: Avraham Soskin and Other Photographers

Avraham Soskin (1881-1963) was the quintessential "Tel Aviv photographer" in the first decades following the city’s establishment. His photograph of the historic lottery of housing parcels that took place on April 11, 1909, on the Jaffa sand dunes is the most frequently reproduced and widely disseminated image of early Tel Aviv. Soon thereafter, the streets of the Ahuzat Bayit suburb were laid out and the first buildings erected. From 1914 to 1933 Soskin maintained his studio at 24 Herzl Street, down the block from the new town’s principal landmark, the Herzliah Gymnasium. After he closed his studio he supported himself through a typesetting (zincography) business.

"The meeting founding Tel-Aviv 1908" [sic] (source: Avraham Soskin, Tel Aviv, 1926). The lottery of housing plots for the Ahuzat Bayit suburb took place on April 11, 1909. Soskin’s familiar photograph of that event quickly achieved iconic status.

The leaders of the Zionist movement, both in Palestine and abroad, were well aware of the power of photography as a medium for publicity and propaganda. Dozens of Soskin’s photographs were reproduced on postcards during the early years, and in 1926 some achieved canonic status when they were published in a small album aptly entitled Tel Aviv. Soskin is the most prominent photographer represented in the Eliasaf Robinson Collection, which has rich holdings of historically significant postcards, commercial photographs, and snapshots produced by other photographers.

Avraham Soskin, on his most famous photograph:

“One day, it was in 1909, I was roaming with the camera in one hand and the tripod on my other arm, on my way from a walk through the sand dunes of what is today Tel Aviv to Jaffa. Where the Herzliah Gymnasium once stood I saw a group of people who had assembled for a housing plot lottery. Although I was the only photographer in the area, the organizers hadn’t seen fit to invite me, and it was only by chance that this historic event was immortalized for the next generations.”

Avraham Soskin, from a newspaper interview with the journalist Israel Ginzburg (Ha-Boker, November 10, 1961), quoted by Guy Raz in “Soskin’s Theater,” in Avraham Soskin: A Retrospective (2003).

"Before" [1910] and "After" [1926] views of Nachalat Benyamin Street (source: Avraham Soskin, Tel Aviv, 1926). Eliasaf Robinson’s business, Robinson Books, has its storefront on that street.