Simcha Shirman is a German-born Israeli photographer and educator.
Background
Simcha Shirman was born on April 30, 1947, in Germany to Batya and David, both Holocoust survivors. He was born in Saint Ottilien Convent, which was converted by USA occupation authorities to a soldier and refugee hospital after WWII. His birth certificate states that he is a displaced person. The small family immigrated to Israel in May 1948 and settled in the city of Acre.
Education
Simcha Shirman got the first camera when he was 12 - a relative from America who visited Israel gave it to him and at the age of 15 purchased and set up a photo lab in the bathroom of the small house in Acre's neighborhoods. He did his military service in 1965 in the Shaked patrol unit, as an officer and commander in the patrol.
In 1970, Simcha Shirman decided to go to New York to study photography. In 1972, he began his undergraduate studies at the School of Visual Arts, and in 1976 continued his graduate studies at the Pratt Institute, where he studied with Arthur Fried and where he met and befriended Philip Perkis. Upon graduation in 1978 and received a Master of Fine Arts in photography and art, Shirman returned to Israel with his family to the city of Tel Aviv.
Career
From the beginning of his career, in the tradition of American photography and European photography, Shirman has been involved in his photographs with personal and collective biographical subjects related to the existence of Israeli land, history, memory, the Holocaust, family, the Israeli army, portraits, changing landscapes and sea. Simcha Shirman tackles contemporary existential questions, the victim's image and the victim, the attitude toward, and the social-cultural, social- Guard towers and hunters - pastoral still life with threatening and threatening memory. He accompanied and documented the changing boundaries of the northern city of Tel Aviv. During his travels to Bezalel, Simcha Shirman followed the changes in the landscape and environment in the Modi'in area, when he came to Jerusalem. Acre, his childhood town, is the subject of his work, focusing on the Old City and its alleys, horses, old and new architecture, the Muslim cemetery, and the sea.
Simcha Shirman also photographed the sea in Tel Aviv with reference to the horizon line - a meeting of the sea and the sky - and the space of existence and daily and sometimes unattainable occurrences, in endless grays.