MEMORABLE PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION COPY OF THE LAST WAR, A DRAMATIC PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD OF ISRAEL ACROSS FOUR DECADES, WARMLY INSCRIBED IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION BY MICHA BAR-AM TO FELLOW PHOTOJOURNALIST PETER TURNLEY

BAR-AM, Micha. The Last War [in Hebrew]. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1996). Tall quarto, original black cloth, original photographic dust jacket. $400.

First edition, published in Jerusalem, inscribed in green ink on the half title by Israeli photojournalist Micha Bar-Am to fellow photographer Peter Turnley, “For Peter & Amy (Try to read the book from right like the Bible…), With great respect, Orna & Micha Bar-Am, Tel-Aviv, March 1996,” with 136 finely screened photographic plates (many double-page)—an dramatic record of Israel from the 1950s to the turn of the century, with text in Hebrew.

Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am, born in Berlin in 1930, moved to Palestine at age six and as a young man began recording the life of Israel and its people—a project he describes as his own “lifetime assignment.” Bar-Am has twice received the prestigious Robert Capa Award and earned acclaim as “a deeply committed Israeli and a fiercely independent journalist” in over two decades as a photojournalist for the New York Times. In 2000 Bar-Am was awarded Israel’s highest cultural prize, the Israel Prize for Visual Arts, paying tribute to a career distinguished by both his compassion and his powerful frontline photographs of the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 war in Lebanon—many contained here in The Last War (title in Hebrew). With 136 black-and-white photographic images arranged chronologically from 1956-95; essays by Michael Levin, Annabelle Melzer, Yeshayahu Nir and José Saramago. This distinctive association copy inscribed in the year of publication to close friend Peter Turnley, a noted photojournalist who has chronicled “almost every important international news event of the last 15 years” for Newsweek and Harper’s Magazine (New York Times). Bookseller ticket.

A fine association copy.