Werner Braun

Werner Braun was born in 1918 in Nuremberg

Braun was born in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1918. As the Nazis rose to power he worked as an apprentice in a workshop in Fürth, where he first encountered photography. He became a Zionist and in 1937 left Germany for a Youth Aliyah training farm in Sweden.

In Sweden he learned professional photography from the photographer Marli Shamir. He later moved to Denmark, where he married Yael Renata Braun in 1942. After the German invasion, the family was evacuated to Sweden, where he exhibited modernist and abstract photographs.

In 1946 he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. In 1947 he bought a photo lab on Ben Yehuda Street and named it Photo Braun. He joined the Haganah and took part in the fighting for Jerusalem in the War of Independence.

From 1948 he worked as a freelance photojournalist. He photographed for the Jewish National Fund, served as chief photographer of the Hebrew University from 1952 to 1998, and from 1956 was an official photographer of the Government Press Office, covering the Eichmann trial. He learned to dive in Eilat in 1952 and later also took aerial photographs.

He married the artist and photographer Anat Rotem in 1971, and they lived in Mevaseret Zion. Braun died on 25 December 2018 and was buried at Kibbutz Ma'ale HaHamisha. He left an archive of some 300,000 negatives and contacts.