Kotel - The Wailing Wall Sandu Mendrea was born in 1930 in Romania. He spent the war years relatively safely in the country's capital, Bucharest, where he started his studies for a M.A. in theatre and film directing in 1948, the year the Communists took over power. After working for four years as a director of documentary films, he decided in 1956 to abandon this field which in those days was dominated by Soviet propaganda, and take the camera into his own hands - as a photographer. He was soon to become one of the country's best-known photographers, which allowed him to exhibit at over 200 international photography exhibitions. After winning several major awards, he received the title "Excellency of the International Photographer's Federation" (EFIAP) in 1965. After 1968, he periodically travelled abroad and subsequently published photography books about the cities and countries he visited, such as Switzerland, Weimar, New York, Leningrad and Prague. This continued until 1983, when after getting his new project on Denmark through censorship, the book was withdrawn from printing - because of lack of paper... This event convinced him about the complete lack of prospects in communist Romania, and helped him and his family decide to leave for Israel. After a life in which his Jewish identity played a very peripheral role, and for a man with deep ties with his Romanian home country, it was a very hard decision to take. At the end of 1986, the Mendreas were allowed to leave. Once in Israel, hes soon discovered the photographically most interesting place in the country: the Wailing Wall. The Hassidic men in their picturesque, ancient-style garments praying together with fully armed soldiers, prophet-like looking old rabbis, intently reading next to bored little boys, too young to really participate in their grandfathers' rituals, the always present combination of deep religious feeling and the typical chaos of this public site and tourist attraction - all this made him come and photograph the place time and again over the last nine years. Dozens of statuesque, melancholy or amusing pictures are the result. What they all have in common is the note of respect, together with the straight-forwardness with which he approaches these people who are basically so different from him, and the streak of mystery they preserve in his pictures. His son Dinu Mendrea, born in 1970 in Bucharest, started seriously photographing in his teens. Serving in the IDF as a photographer, he used every spare hour for taking pictures at the Wailing Wall. Being much more familiar with the language, the country and its inner conflicts, he never allowed himself to reproduce the usual view of the place. His often unconventional compositions, his ability to notice surreal situations, his spontaneous sympathy for each and every genuine human and religious emotion, together with his ironical reaction towards any false or pathetic gesture, give an astonishing freshness to his pictures. As a consequence of his continuous work on the subject for over nine years, these pictures have also become a landmark of Dinu Mendrea's stylistic evolution. After working for a weekly newspaper in 1992, Dinu Mendrea completed his studies in photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. During the last four years he has been working in Israel for major European publishers, photographing for travelogues, illustrated Bibles and guide books, as well for a book about medieval art in Romania. The exhibition "Kotel - The Wailing Wall" was first shown in 1993 in Jerusalem, and since then also in Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Ghent and Toronto. The Jewish Museum in Vienna has acquired two of the pictures, including them in the exhibition "Theodor Herzl - 100 years since the publication of 'The Jewish State' and in the accompanying volume "Juden-Fragen." Click here to send an e-mail to the photographers.

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