Helmar Lerski

Biography

Helmar Lerski, born in the Alsatian border city of Strasbourg that changed hands between Germany and France, and brought up in Switzerland, became identified as a stills photographer and a cinematographer with the creative period after the Great War known as Weimar.Of Jewish ancestry,he spent most of the 1930s and 1940s documenting the Zionist project building a new home for settlers in Palestine.His images and the films he also did there capture the attempt by the colonists to work hard at creating what would later become Israel, but once the nation state was coming into being, Lerski became disenchanted with what was happening and left the Middle East.