Mula Eshet (1934-2024)
Born in Tel Aviv. he studied in the Max Fein vocational high school. After his military service, he moved to Kibbutz Sasa where he was placed in charge of marketing agricultural produce in Haifa, where he first saw Uri Avneri’s HaOlam HaZeh weekly news magazine – the first in Israel to use western-style photography. In the late 1950s Eshet moved to Tel Aviv and in 1960 he was asked by film producer Itzik Kol to help him in the shooting of Baruch Dinar’s masterpiece They Were Ten (Hem Hayu Asara). At his own initiative, Eshet photographed scenes and portraits of actors on the set (Ninet Dinar, Bomba Tzur, Oded Teomi, and others), and sent them to the local entertainment magazines which began to develop at that time. During the 1960s he published photographs (mainly of actors) in several leading magazines. Later on, he began to photograph fashion productions, an area where he became particularly influential.
At the same time, Eshet was also deeply involved in theater photography, and became the photographer of many dance companies, including Batsheva, Bat-Dor and Moshe Efrati’s Kol Demama (“sound of silence”). In the 1970s, he joined Israel Haramati and the two opened the Mula Haramati Studio for fashion and advertisement photography. In 1981, he held the first fashion show in Israel as part of the Israel Fashion Week. In the late 1980s, Eshet and Haramati decided to go separate ways. In the early 1990s, Eshet founded Mula Center for makeup, cosmetics and styling. The company was closed by the end of the decade. Eshet stopped working as a professional photographer in the mid-1990s, but he keeps photographing for his own pleasure.
In 2012, a solo exhibition of his works was held at Mishkan Gallery in Holon. His works are available in scanned format at the Digital Media Center of the Younes and Soraia Nazarian Library at the University of Haifa.