About Flash90

Flash90

Flash90 is an Israeli photojournalism agency based in Jerusalem. Founded in 1990 by the press photographer Nati Shohat, it describes itself as Israel's leading photojournalism agency, and Forbes Israel has described the agency Shohat built as the most influential news agency for coverage of the Israeli press, capturing the highlights of the life of the nation. Flash90 is not a newspaper and does not publish a consumer news product of its own in the ordinary sense. It is a picture agency: its staff photographers and freelance contributors photograph events across Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and newspapers, websites, magazines, institutions and publishing companies license and publish the resulting images. Its photographs appear every day under credit lines in the form of a photographer's name followed by Flash90, in Israeli outlets and in major periodicals abroad.

Founding and founder

Flash90 was founded in 1990 by Nati Shohat. Shohat was born in Jerusalem in 1964, had been photographing from a young age, and had worked as a press photographer since 1987, three years before he set up the agency. The year of the founding is carried in the agency's name, and the business he created grew from a single photographer's operation into the agency that Israeli newspapers came to rely on for daily picture coverage. Shohat has remained the agency's central figure: the agency's official website still lists him personally, by name, as its contact alongside the office number. In an interview published by Forbes Israel, Shohat described the agency in personal terms, saying that he had mentored several generations of photographers and that the agency he set up was like a child growing up and constantly evolving, and that every time he saw a photograph from one of the agency's photographers he was filled with happiness.

Jerusalem base and how the agency works

The agency is headquartered in Jerusalem, at 14 Hillel Street. Its published office telephone number is +972 2 623 1769, and its official website is flash90.com. The working model is the classic press-photo agency model. Flash90 employs staff photographers and also works with numerous freelance photographers all over Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Those photographers cover breaking news and planned events as they happen, the pictures are gathered by the agency, captioned and offered through its daily updated website, and client editors select and publish the images they need. The agency also takes on specific assignments: newspapers, magazines, institutions and publishing companies approach it for commissioned coverage, in Israel and for assignments worldwide. Because its photographers are spread across the country and the territories rather than concentrated in one newsroom, the agency can place a photographer at an event in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the West Bank or near Gaza on the same day.

Archive and daily service

A central part of the agency's offer is its archive. Flash90's own description of its service says that its daily updated website features more than 100,000 archive photographs covering news, politics, religion and culture from the entire region of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. For client editors, that archive functions as a visual record of more than three decades of Israeli and Palestinian public life: elections and governments, wars and protests, religious festivals and everyday culture. The archive is organised on the agency's current website under topic headings that show how the agency itself sorts its coverage, including Israeli politics, protests, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinians, settlements, weather, ultra-Orthodox Jewish life, culture, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and, reflecting the most recent period, the Iron Swords War and the campaign for the return of the hostages. In recent years, Shohat has also enriched the agency's archive and website with photographs of landscapes and cultures from around the world.

Coverage of news, politics, religion and culture

The subjects named in the agency's own description — news, politics, religion and culture — match the credit lines that appear in the press. Flash90 photographers cover the Knesset and the government in Jerusalem, elections and party politics, demonstrations and protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, military and security operations, and the recurring confrontations in the West Bank and around Gaza. They also cover the religious calendar that shapes life in Jerusalem and beyond, from ultra-Orthodox communities to the holy sites of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and cultural and everyday subjects across the country. During the war that followed the Hamas attack of October 2023, the agency's photographers documented, among much else, the rallies of the hostage families in Tel Aviv and at the Gaza border, and its website created dedicated topic collections for the war and for the hostages' return, which remain among the headings on its front page.

Nati Shohat's own photography

Shohat has continued to work as a photographer in his own right alongside running the agency, and Forbes Israel included him in its project on five Israeli photographers who gained international success. He told Forbes that the main product he and the agency market to the world is internal documentation of news events in Israel and the Palestinian National Authority — photographs that captivate major media outlets. His own most memorable photograph, he said, was taken in 1996 and shows a combat engineering soldier who, during heavy riots, halted, reached out to help an elderly Palestinian man and let him use his rifle as a walking cane; Shohat described it as a moment in which he saw the Jewish spirit in action. His credited work ranges from an undercover Yamas police officer making an arrest during clashes in East Jerusalem in March 2010, to ultra-Orthodox Capoeira instructors training by the Dead Sea in 2015, to the Carnival of Venice in 2020, an example of the landscape and culture photography from around the world that he has added to the archive in recent years.

Documentary projects

Beyond daily news assignments, Shohat has described leading personal documentary projects that allowed a closer look at areas he considered particularly challenging to cover. In his Forbes Israel interview he listed lengthy documentation of soldiers of undercover units, the lives of settlers in the West Bank, and a training course for border soldiers. He also documented closed sex communities, the activities of Israeli doctors working to save lives in Africa, and Israeli-Jordanian relations, among a host of other projects. He attributed the access those projects required to an ability to create a personal connection with the subjects of his photography, which, he said, produced a great deal of openness on their part and allowed him to document rare and extraordinary moments over the years. The coronavirus pandemic, he said, pushed him to make a leap in creativity in daily coverage and to answer difficult professional questions, such as how to document hospitals filled with families and patients and how to convey the difficulty faced by medical staff, and how to work during lockdown.

Photographers who have worked through the agency

The agency's credit lines have carried the names of many Israeli photojournalists. Gili Yaari, a documentary and news photographer born in 1971 whose work focuses on social and humanitarian issues and contemporary Israeli subjects, has been a contributing photographer for Flash90 since 2007; his pictures have been published in the New York Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, the Guardian and the Financial Times, among others. Abir Sultan began working at the Jerusalem-based agency in 2009, after documenting the disengagement from Gaza, the Second Lebanon War and fighting in Gaza as a photographer in the Israeli army's Spokesperson's Filming Unit and freelancing for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth; he later became a staff photographer for the European Pressphoto Agency. Hadas Parush worked full-time at Flash90, shooting local news, feature stories and magazine portraits for the many newspapers the agency works with, after two years as a video journalist at the Jerusalem Post website; a profile by her Canadian journalism school noted that working at Flash90 also allowed her to pursue stories that personally interested her, feature them on the agency's website and sell them to magazines. In more recent years, credit lines in the Israeli and international press have frequently carried names including Yonatan Sindel, Tomer Neuberg, Avshalom Sassoni and Chaim Goldberg on politics and protest coverage, and Nasser Ishtayeh and Abed Rahim Khatib on West Bank and Gaza coverage.

Clients in Israel

Within Israel, the agency's own description says that many of the country's leading newspapers and websites count among its clients. Its daily working relationship with Maariv, one of Israel's largest newspapers, was noted in Abir Sultan's professional biography, which described Flash90 as working on a daily basis with Maariv. The Times of Israel has been identified in print as a client of Flash 90: when the agency amended a caption in 2018, the Times of Israel amended the same caption on its own site in line with the agency's change. Credit lines for the agency's photographers appear routinely in the Jerusalem Post, in Haaretz coverage, in Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporting distributed to Jewish newspapers abroad, and across Israeli news websites, which together make the Flash90 credit one of the most frequently seen picture credits in Israeli journalism.

International reach

From its inception, according to Forbes Israel, the agency operated with newspapers from around the world, and in time it began to market subscriptions to international newspapers, in a model similar to that of the leading international agencies. The agency's own description names international periodicals in which its work has been published, including Stern and Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde and Le Point in France, Corriere della Sera in Italy, and The Independent and The Sunday Times in Britain. It says that over 100 professional and international clients use its services, and that it cooperates with leading photo agencies worldwide. Through those relationships, photographs taken by its staff and freelancers in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza reach readers far beyond Israel, often on the same day they are taken.

Captions, corrections and reputation

Because its captions travel with its photographs into client publications, the wording of those captions is part of the agency's public record. In June 2018, Flash 90 captions on photographs of Palestinians preparing balloons and kites carrying flammable material toward Israel from Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, described the men as activists. After the media watchdog CAMERA communicated with the agency, Flash 90 amended its captions to remove that description, and the Times of Israel, as its client, made the same change. The episode was reported at the time as a commendable correction. The agency's own account of its standing with clients stresses the level of its service and the quick response to clients' requests, and says its reputation has been built over the years on that professionalism, whether the client is a newspaper, a magazine, an institution or a publishing company. More than three decades after its founding, the agency remains active from its Hillel Street base, its photographers continue to appear on the major stories of the day, and its founder remains its public contact.