For more than sixty years his photographs have played a central role in the construction of Israel's cultural memory, and have presented the country's image to the entire world.

Born in Berlin 1930, Micha Bar-Am arrived with his family in Israel (then Palestine) in 1936, and grew up in Haifa.

He worked at the port of Haifa and joined the Palmach Harel Brigade during Israel's War of Independence.

In the early 1950s, he participated in archeological expeditions in the Galilee and later in the search for scrolls in the Judean Desert, also, at that time, he began to photograph his surroundings and neighbors.

In 1977 was asked by director Marc Scheps to establish the Department of Photography at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the first of its kind in Israel.

In the early 1940s, Bar-Am started taking pictures of life on a kibbutz; he used borrowed cameras until he bought a Leica.

After publishing his first book, Across Sinai (1957), Bar-Am gained work as a press photographer and in the editorial staff of the Israeli Army magazine, Ba-Mahaneh, from 1957 to 1967.

He writes about his work: I keep my internal eye open for that other, metaphorical image that transcends illustration to achieve a wholeness of its own.