A Body Gains Authority Within Nothing

EDITION

2021

school

NB Haifa School of Design
Haifa, Israel

In the body of photography lies an essence of touch. Light touches a sensitive medium. The reaction is the appearance of an image on the film or paper which then gets processed and fixed with the touch of chemicals. At this current time, touch is everything and nothing to me, it’s real and fake, it’s sensitive and cruel, it’s scary and wonderful. The spaces in which I work move between the house I grew up in and the house I live in today in the city of Haifa, which also serves as a studio and a darkroom. The photographic archive of images that my grandfather created before and after immigrating to Israel from Germany is used as a bridge through movement and time, through past and present, through Berlin and Haifa, while corresponding with five generations. Creating with different techniques, traditional and new, allows me to explore and play with different options of appearance of touch and memory. I work with large format, contact prints with phone screens, digital scans, reassembling still life in my home studio, and photographing my relatives with an ode to the old German way of image-making and object/subject placing. Using these techniques I move along a range of control of the final image. From total control of the process to work in the dark, in a state of blindness to the final image, only until it’s fixed, still blurry in its final form. Closeness and distance are present in the work in their physical sense but also in relation to memory and erasure. In a time which reality swings between the existing and the made up, the option of catching or grasping something real is doubtful. When what exists distances itself from the unseen to the point of losing touch with reality.