Moshe Raviv

Moï Ver (Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic) was born in 1904 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he also studied painting. In 1927, visited the Bauhaus in Dessau to take courses with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Joseph Albers, before he left for Paris to study at the Ecole de Photo Ciné. After several unrealised projects for photographic books, necessity led him to begin a career as a reporter. He immigrated to Palestine in 1934, and from 1950 he devoted himself to painting. He died in 1995.

In Paris, his quintessential avant-garde book object published in 1931, Mo- Ver succeeds in blending dynamic photographic montage with an elaborate graphic layout. Utilizing the double-spread as one unified plane, each turn of the page not only surprises, but accentuates the charged rhythm built into the book itself. The bulk of information in these pictures documents mundane street activities in cobblestoned Paris of the late twenties. But the method in which Moi Ver chose to present his material, in its kaleidoscopic layering and frenzied repetitiveness, emphasizes an experimental approach to picture-construction; as if we, the viewers, were walking about bombarded by noise and reflected light. Within each picture, visual data is spliced with pattern, alluding to a lapse of time, as if they were short film vignettes.

M. Vorobeichic, who also used the artist name Moi Ver, and whose real name was Moses Vorobeichic (1904), in Israel renamed Moshe Raviv. This painter/photographer is known for his picture-books on the Ghetto of Wilna and Paris (end of the twenties), early examples of the Bauhaus photographic style. (German) From the Preface The Jewish Lane in Light and Shadow by S. Chneour