┐ Photographs from inside the Israeli army └

“…Israeli soldiers’ use of social media has given a unique insight into an “army” that functions more like a rabble – with soldiers misusing weapons, breaking laws, and expressing violent and extreme views and posting images of themselves doing it online.

A case in point is Osher Maman, another 20-year-old Israeli soldier currently enlisted in the “elite” Golani Brigade.

Maman’s Instagram account currently includes 549 images which show, among other things, images of him mishandling weapons and breaking military laws. The earliest date from April 2012 and the most recent from today. An illustrative selection – with tags where he included them – are used throughout this post. Maman also expresses deeply racist and even genocidal views towards Palestinians and Arabs. (Note: following publication of this article, Maman has deleted his various social media accounts).

What does it mean that the Israeli army recruits a soldier, with a dubious history, who is stupid enough to post images of himself committing more criminal offenses?

Is this a man who should be handling – playing with – lethal weapons in any circumstances? Or does it mean that this Most Moral Army so lacks discipline that soldiers like Maman can break the law without fear of consequences?

A lust for violence and genocidal hatred of Arabs

Osher Maman freely expresses his deep, even genocidal hatred of Palestinians and his desire to see them oppressed and killed. Responding to a comment on one of his images, for example, Maman told the commenter

Lmao for all I care you can comment all my pictures, you’re still a fucking Arab pile of shit, you even smell like it. You’re never going to win over israel (the chosen people) bc you’re a bunch of slaves, shit I probably am the slave master of some Arab who’s related to you… An you all will stay trapped in gaza and every little shittt village that you Palestinians have inside of israel. And you will continue to go to our jails and to have your houses broken in to. Basically your life will be shit until you all die, so go ahead and have fun commenting on my pictures of that’s going to make your death a little better…”

excerpt of the article Stoned, naked, armed and dangerous: more disturbing images from an Israeli soldier’s Instagram, by Ali Abunimah on electronic intifada. continue reading here

Another interesting article about the use of pictures and social media in the context of war The Instagram War: Gaza & Israel, 2012 byMichael Shaw here

┐ Shira Klasmer – Walk the Line └

© Shira Klasmer, Walking the Line, 2012. 10’34” in loop

“The ‘painting’ is performed by the artist holding a ‘brush’ made up of a line of LED lights. The act (of painting) is photographed by two still digital cameras creating a single still frame of long exposure, capturing the traces of the action on to the camera’s sensor. A sequence of frames is edited to a video format, where each frame is the recording of one act of ‘painting’. Transforming the still frames into a video format was done by exposing; scanning each frame from left to right, similar to the direction the images where made.

When working on these sequences in the darkness of the car park, ‘painting’ is transformed to a work of performance. With no physical material engagement and resistance, ‘painting’ becomes a work of memory and repetition – the reconstruction of a mental imprint, counting steps, rhythmical gestures, movement – a task in the memorisation of the act which was never seen.”

© Shira Klasmer, from English National Ballet (3D)

© Shira Klasmer, from English National Ballet (3D)

“I met choreographer Itzik Galili in London while working on a shoot at Rambert with photographer Chris Nash. He explained he was putting together a show with the English National Ballet called ‘And the earth shall bear again’ and invited me to photograph a rehearsal in June 2012. I have been wanting to test out my new method of photographing in 3D and dreamed of doing so with dancers. These are some of the outcomes. You will need to view these images with a pair of Red/Cyan glasses.”

© Shira Klasmer, from the series Abbreviations, 2009, Lambda print, Diasec, 20 x 180cm

© Shira Klasmer, from the series Abbreviations, 2009, Lambda print, Diasec, 20 x 180cm

“The ‘Scroll’ photographs began as a fascination with the transition of time, I have been exploring the etching and interpretation of movement within the still image. The works focus on motion within landscape photography and as a perpetual narrative that integrates the elements of time and space within the image.

The original image (the scroll photographs) extends beyond the standard frame dimension and provides the viewer with a visual horizontal narrative. I work with my old fashioned Pentax camera which I have modified by attaching a motor and in pulling the film through the camera while the shutter is open, I create a long exposure (up to 4min minute) of the entire roll of 35mm film. The result is a photograph that is one frame – the entire length of 36-frames, and reveals an elasticity to time where the future, present and past co-exist as one image.”

┐ Assaf Shaham – in the gap between the comma and its following letter └

© Assaf Shaham, Untitled, from the series Time After Time and Again

“The work Time after Time and Again deconstructs photography into its components and reassembles them on one surface that encompasses the essence of the photographic act, the fundamentals of color photography, and the marvel that combines light and time into a photograph. At the same time, in a kind of an aside, Shaham also subverts the concept of freezing the moment which religiously accompanies photography and differentiates it from cinema. In a simple but not innocent still photograph, Shaham records movement on a timeline: a landscape depicting a kind of a sundial while simultaneously recording it as it becomes a photograph. In three exposures timed over one hour, in which three filters using the RGB color model, three colored projections were made, marking the location of the stick’s shadow through the sun’s movement over one hour.

Unlike 19th-century early photographs—where the limits of the photographic material’s sensitivity necessitated long exposure to light, making the details that had moved during the exposure into a pale blur or a dark color patch in the photographs—in Shaham’s photographs the movement is recorded with three clear, sharp projections whose location marks the exact time in which each of the color filters was used. The sundial on the sand demonstrates, through a single photograph within one hour, the process that the medium underwent in 170 years, and clearly and succinctly formulates the conceptual differences between continuous and fragmented movement; it is also the conceptual distance between photography and cinema and the gap between the analogue and digital worlds. This is a decisive phase in the evolution of man and machine and in the history of science and ideas, in the technological revolution of knowledge-rich industries, which is, of course, a social and cultural revolution.”

excerpt of the article Assaf Shaham: New Ways to Steal Old Souls, by Nili Goren, as in the Shpilman Institute for Photography. Continue reading here

© Assaf Shaham, Full Reflection (700dpi), 2012, from the series The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

© Assaf Shaham, Full Reflection (500dpi), 2012, from the series The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

Regarding The Emperor’s New Clothes

Imagine two scanners facing one another as they perform the only function they are capable of performing: scanning. They embark on an intense seductive mating ritual. One head moves up, the other one down, they both go down and simultaneously go back up again; In movement, whether in or out of synchronization, they exchange fluids and perform a discursive sexual act.

Susan Sontag claimed that photography is “not such a successful form of intercourse” 1 because the camera maintains a distance between that which is penetrating and that which is being penetrated. Assaf Shaham’s scanners will never feel each other. There will forever be that distance between them, rendering actual contact impossible. The resulting works of this sterile intercourse are yet surprisingly fertile. Flat, mechanical and technological to the extreme, these color fields are exemplary sons of a formalistic dynasty: they are Mondrian’s grandchildren, Rothko’s nephews and Walead Beshty’s adopted children. The yellowish light of the projecting bulb used in the darkroom is here replaced with the bright white light of the scanning device and random strips of lights, the sharp and accurate inkjet prints are favored over chemical photo paper and the ready-made was chosen over the artist’s darkroom.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

Shaham’s work is concerned with the very space between the king’s death and the beginning of his successor’s reign, precisly in the gap between the comma and it’s following letter it happens after photography has been repeatedly murdered; after it died, was re-born, fell down, rotted from within, was salvaged and brought back up on its feet again.

What appears like a large-scale replica of an Ilford photo paper pack leans against a wall, basking in a realistic glory of sorts. It is a marvelous reproduction of the original with a three dimensional appearance that was only altered as the original motif was replaced by the artist: where a harmless consensual image once appeared, Shaham has implanted a photographic rape scene.

In a small piece, dark silhouettes are burnt within a split of a second. It is a black footnote at the endpoint of a prolonged history of power and violence. American radiation in Hiroshima scorched out an eternal memory in real time. The gesture of the original photographer of this image – equally created by the bomb – is reactivated here by Shaham. That photographer is dead, long live the new photographer.”
source: Assaf’s website

┐ Yanai Toister – Toward a Brief Manifesto on Photography └

© Yanai Toister, Bouy (From Register of Facts), 2004, C-print, 156/120 cm

© Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 80/100 cm

© Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 65/80 cm

“In order to formulate a binding stand with regard to the photographs in the exhibition, one must first acknowledge that the word “photography” today refers to a very broad spectrum of rather loosely connected practices. Any attempt to define photography as a differentiated, independent ontological category can no longer rely on the Barthean scheme of “that-has-been” or “that-has-been-there” with regard to the photograph; it must refer to photography itself as a “has-been-there” and also, perhaps, as “has-been.” Hence, all the works in the exhibition—as reflexive, dynamic, and universal as they may be— outline not only feasibility, a state of mind, or a cross section, but mainly the possibility of Israeli photography in relation to adjacent disciplines and in relation to itself.

And if it “has-been” at all, then in most cases what has been here is not an act of photography or an instance of being photographed (these are all restricted to an anecdote and are bound to the here-and-now, to the there-and-then). The sole event that has been and may be again in the future, is the emergence of a photograph (sometimes as a tableau), and the way in which this event and the circumstances that preceded it were registered in matter; for when we dub the photograph a mere image, we are confusing one real world with another, one concrete universe with another. Ultimately, every photograph transpires in a three-dimensional world (or four-dimensional, if we consider the temporal dimension as substance), and is made of real materials. It cannot be reduced to a state of semblance only. As a mere image, every photograph strives to lure the viewer into a rectangle, a frame, as an extra-spatial, extra-temporal pillory, as an experience whose apathy captures every viewer in the limbo of a vectorial world.

The most important question that ought to be asked about photography is not a question of inherence (What is the meaning? An infinite presence, according to aesthetic formalism, or an ideologydriven, use-dependent mobile state), but rather a question of specificity: What kind of physical space and what kind of social space do different photographs generate and sustain around themselves? An image space? A material space? Or a space of diffusion where these work together like two lobes of a single brain? Oscillating like a pendulum between appearance and disappearance, as concurrent presence within and without a picture, as both the part and its maker—the exhibition, through the works it brings together, strives to lay the groundwork for reading the use of abstraction tools in photography not necessarily as a reference to the real world, but mainly as concretizations of the pictorial possibilities contained within photography. Every image needs a real existence, and a real world cannot be transformed into a world of images only. It is here that the true significance of these photographs lies, for they embody the understanding that every image always and necessarily relies on its constituent materials.”

written by Yanai Toister, Tel Aviv, July 2009

┐ Blindness └

all photos © Adam Hinton in Gaza, 2012

all drawings © Joe Sacco, taken from Footnotes in Gaza, 2010. An interview with Joe Sacco about the book and the massacres reported in it here

Articles about the Palestine/Israle conflict can be accessed via Stop the War Coalition

┐ Michal Heiman └

CRITICAL IMAGE: MICHAL HEIMAN, By Dr. Ariella Azoulay

Michal Heiman chose the position of the spectator looking at someone else’s photographs taken by someone else, in which someone else is photographed, which someone else collected. Heiman turns this quintessential position of spectator (in a museum, but not only) into her own, elaboration and giving it back to it to spectator, whom she transforms not only into the subject of the artistic image but also into the subject of the psychological image. This is the spectator who is asked, on several levels, to assume Heiman’s position and to reproduce it. When Heiman looks at these photographs of her mother-in-law, she is following classifications which are latent in the family album, acting within the framework of the restrictions and advantages of her family relations with the photographed (her mother-in-law), attuned to the route she traced on her meticulously planned journeys as well as in random rambles. Though Heiman does this without relinquishing essential activities of the subject’s position, such as sorting, selecting, classifying, etc, she performs these activities as an accumulative sum of activities familiar from two institutions and practices – the musial and the psychological. The images she presents to the “subject” of her “test” are mediated through these two institution/ practices. They are presented in a “test” box by an “examiner”, who also duplicates Heiman’s positioning, obviously without the possibility of identity between the two of them, between them and the photographed, or between them and the “subject” of the “test”. These relations of similarity and difference between the personae/ positions dissolve the established hierarchical relations which institutions/ practices such as the museum and the psychology apparatus seek to preserve, and point to their fluidity. Heiman is attracted to these two systems, seduced by one and functioning within the other, but at the same time she criticizes them, especially by turning one against the other. She bypasses the museal apparatus by way of the psychological apparatus. Within the framework f the museum institution she develops exchange relations borrowed from the psychological apparatus, rather than those practiced in the museum I which the boundaries of the subject are predetermined by the way he or she is placed in front of the artistic object. The relations of replacement that Heiman proposes are those existing in the psychoanalytical situation, with one crucial difference: they are not continuous in time, and the analyst cannot gain knowledge relating to the analysand and take an active part in subjectivizing her. Thus the therapeutic situation is divested of its characteristic power relations. The activating of the general patterns of the structure of the therapeutic situation in a museum setting through the “test” mode of the M.H.T., provides an opportunity to disrupt the museum order. This order is based on complex relations of silence, both on the part of the museum object and on the part of the museum subject, and on the distinction between the different subject of art – -the artist and the spectator. The museum spectator is invited to induce the mute object to speak, but only later, and outside the boundaries of the site. Heiman’s spectator is invited to induce the scene to speak at the site itself. The existence of the images Heiman offers for viewing and voicing violates the standard norms of presentation, and serves as a point of departure for unexpected encounters with conveyor of parallel, contradictory, other images, encounters in which she finds herself being led no less than leading.

Michal Heiman’s “test” is intended for women. It suggests that they look at a number of pictures of a woman-a mother figure and her own mother-in-law – and a few pictures of women who were inscribed in a history which is not only theirs. The first photographed figure is like a magnified stereotype of the (Jewish) mother figure. She is more (and less) than a citizen of the (Jewish) state. She doesn’t tour like a tourist, looking rather like the proprietress who comes to collect the rent or to be nice to the tenants and improve their conditions of living. She embodies much of what is repressed in that State, and precisely the close relationship to her presents an opportunity to take a straight look and see how it “really” looks. How the overbearingness, excessiveness, and unusefulness of this figure looks. She has herself photographed incessantly, in any place, on any occasion. She is always ready with the camera “just in case”- this may be the decisive moment, so she had better have proofs, evidence, in her hands. For one mustn’t let destiny rule the world alone. Together with her, in the same box, there are seven other women. These are women whose “decisive moment” indeed caught up with them. Each of them experienced a “crucial” moment, performed an act, and this actually justified a portrait, an image, an immortalization, but there was no camera to immortalize the moment. The portrait that they bequeathed is thus a portrait which does not bear witness to the incisive moment but keeps manifesting the decisive relation between them and the social order they disturbed and whose rules they sought to suspend. It thus constitutes a double portrait- a portrait of them and of the social order they challenged. The first one is of the three (surviving) quintuplets the Dionne sister, who having been put on public display as children together with their two other sisters, eventually broke the silence to bring this glaring abuse of a child’s body to light (and to claim damages for themselves). The second is of Ulrike Meinhof, leader of the Baader Meinhof group, from whose portrait it is always possible to revert to the boundaries of the rules of the game of the democratic state, a game in which everything is negotiable, except the rules of the game and so allowing the exclusion o any player attempting to put those rules I question. The third photograph is of Leila Khaled, the Palestinian freedom fighter who became famous for skyjacking in which she was involved. Khaled expropriated the time of the flight passengers to point to the time and the place of which her people, the Palestinian people, had been robbed. The fourth portrait, of Eva Hesse, an artist who put her body in the center of her art long before the artistic discourse could have contained such a manifestation, evidenced an apparatus saturated with violence and the tensions between an individual, a body, and a position from which to see, speak out, and act, and the last portrait, of Kochava Levy, who found herself in a hotel that was occupied by terrorists, and masterfully played – with her unprecedented feat of conducting negotiations with the terrorists – the role assigned to her by history.

(Dr. Ariella Azoulay, D’Israel: Barry Frydlender, Michal Heiman, Efrat Shvily, and Dana & Boaz Zonshine, Le Qartier, Center of Contemporary Art, Quimper, 1999 [pp. 33-34] )

More of Michal’s work here

┐ Sheffy Bleier └

© Sheffy Bleier, Organs,, from the series Organ Gardens, 2007

© Sheffy Bleier, Internal Landscape in the Pink Outside, 2009

“Ultimately, the question that lurks in these images is that of the possibility of reaching the sublime, the spiritual through the medium that appears wholly antithetical to it – body’s inner organs. True, the organs are not “raw meat” – which borders on the horror of the formless – for they retain well-defined forms and texture. And it is precisely their form and texture – mysterious, yet troublingly familiar – that turns them into visual medium of something utterly different from their materiality. They become an “alien body”, the body that offers another route to the beautifu,l that manages to escape the bodily materiality while remaining wholly embedded in it.”

Jerzy Michalowicz, Jerusalem, August 2008; full text here

More of Sheffy’s work here

║ Elad Lassry ║

© Elad Lassry, Burmese Mother, Kittens, 2008

© Elad Lassry, Two wolves, 2008

“Rarely is there enough visual information in a photograph by Elad Lassry to quite tell what is going on in the picture. Thatʼs the reverse of what most photographs intend, dedicated as they typically are to delivering data selectively plucked from the quotidian world. Since we live in an engorged image-environment, where we are continuously hectored by photographs that purport to be telling us stuff, the subtle absence disorients. (…)”

source: Knight, Christopher, “Photographs that ask questions” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2009

More of Elad’s work here

║ Ori Gersht ║

© Ori Gersht, Blow up No. 14#06, from the series Time after time, 2008

“The latest digital technology has enabled Gersht to create contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of Fantin-Latour and other still-life masters into a contemporary context. His photographs echo the appearance of oil paintings and allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over traditional still-life and vanitas painting. Yet they are distanced from them due to the instantaneous digital process employed, which captures each shattering still-life at a speed of 1/6000 of a second and stores the information immaterially as data on a hard drive until each is fabricated as a Light Jet print, returning the image to the material realm of two-dimensional artworks.

Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.”

Source: Mummery + Schnelle

More of Ori’s work can be seen here and here

║ Angelika Sher ║

© Angelike Sher, AC/DC 2, from the series Thirteen, 2007

© Angelike Sher, Pink slippers, from the series Thirteen, 2007

║ Gaston Zvi Ickowicz ║

© Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Untitled #2, from the series August 06, 2006

© Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Untitled #6, from the series August 06, 2006

“The images in the series “August 06″ were taken in the summer of 2006, during the cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon.
These photographs portray Ickowicz’s view of the war  a dark cloud that is at once present and absent. The images in this series examine the traces of a war that faded as quickly as it had begun  the vestiges of its contaminating presence.”

To see more of Gaston’s work click here

║ Adi Nes ║

© Adi Nes, Hagar, from the series Bible, 2006

© Adi Nes, Untitled, from the series Soldiers, 2000

© Adi Nes, Untitled, from the series Soldiers, 1998

“Staged photography, the style which I’ve adopted, demands complex production and exacting direction, if for no other reason than a great deal of money and energy are poured into it. This is a style that, actually, developed when photography was invented. Later, people like Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and others brought staged photography to a certain level of artistic perfection. Some view photographers as “hunters” who go out into the streets with their 35mm cameras and zoom lenses in an attempt to “catch” some situation. I work a little differently, perhaps more like “gleaner”. The sources of images I build, the world in which I travel, they are like snapshots for me: personal memories, experiences, impressions of body language or some texture that fascinates me. Frequently I’m aided by documentary photographs by others – whether taken by professionals or amateurs. From tidbits I collect here and there I weave my ideas for a picture and transform them into physical sketches that give me a common language with other production people like those involved with makeup and lighting. With the aid of the camera I bring back the image that has been built from different sources so it becomes a new picture, which tells a story and is part of a series of images which I create. Now that I have the privilege to stage a shot and not rely merely on what reality presents, I can be more picky about the quality of the lighting and the picture, the staging, location and costumes – which are, in a sense, the artist/photographer’s palette. This type of photography fits someone who is, essentially, a control freak. I feel I also have this perfectionist side and desire to control everything down to the smallest detail. For many years I earned a living working in the television and film industry and suspect that much of what I learned in these fields sunk-in to my consciousness and influenced my style of working as a stills photographer. One who looks at my photographs clearly knows they’re staged, yet the experience is akin to entering a movie theater when the lights are dimmed: for a moment you may believe the images that tell a story which is entirely allegorical, a story which may be about you.”

Adi Nes (part of an interview by Jess Dugan which can be read here)

To see more of Adi’s work click here

║ Yuval Yairi ║

© Yuval Yairi, from the series Forevermore

© Yuval Yairi, from the series Forevermore

“Yuval Yairi’s (b. 1961) body of photographs, Forevermore, focuses on the Hansen Hospital in Jerusalem, the abode of Hansen’s disease patients, an illness which had erroneously been identified with biblical leprosy. Originally called Jesus Hilfe, the hospital was founded in 1887 by Protestant missionaries from Germany on a remote hillside, nowadays the Talabiya neighborhood. The massive stone building was designed by architect and researcher of Jerusalem, Conrad Schick (1822-1901). It represents late 19th-century Jerusalem architecture, combining European and Middle Eastern styles. The structure contains evidence of the social and political transformations the city has undergone in the past century. A small part of the compound now serves as an outpatient clinic for treatment of the disease, while most of it stands unused; some of the rooms remain as left by the last patients and staff to inhabit them.
(…)
Yairi photographs the leper house with a digital video camera in still mode, constructing the image from hundreds (at times thousands) of frames. The pictures are taken in the course of several hours, during which the artist slowly and accurately documents every detail in the space from a single position, like the viewer’s observation movement upon entering the space. He selects details, which he then combines into a final unified photographic image containing a wealth of information, one that no single still photograph can contain. Thus, in fact, Yairi overcomes the temporal and spatial limitations of conventional photography.
(…)
Yairi’s works, mainly interiors, deconstruct the cohesive space swiftly captured by the eye and the camera. He juxtaposes one image with another, frame with frame, so that the spaces which are mostly small (a room or a section thereof) appear wide and outspread as in David Hockney’s 1980s works, and especially the Grand Canyon series. Hockney creates a photo-collage comprised of a large number of individual photographs laid side by side, so that the landscape reflected in them is panoramic, wide-angled, containing several concurrent viewpoints and perspectives. Hockney thus transforms the landscape and the frozen photograph into something dynamic that conveys the experience of the monumental scope. Yairi, on the other hand, opts, from the outset, for an intimate, domestic space which he deconstructs into hundreds and thousands of images, so that the viewer loses the sense of the small space. Via deconstruction and reconstruction, both artists attempt to address the experience of the space, to photograph the unphotographable and trace the viewer’s movement in the space.”

Raz Samira (To read full article click here)

To see more of Yuval’s work click here

║ Vardi Kahana ║

© Vardi Kahana, Yael, Safed, from the series One Family 2007

© Vardi Kahana, Tal R, Copenhagen Denmark, from the series One Family 2004

© Vardi Kahana, Cousin Rina, Groningen, Netherlands, from the series One Family 2004

To see more of Verdi’s work click here

║ Inbal Sivan ║

© Inbal Sivan, Baroque, 2003

© Inbal Sivan, Nude, 2007

“Inbal Sivan’s images borrow heavily from traditions in art history, including aspects of the “male gaze.” It entails inactive women looking at some vague point off-camera suggesting that they are not engaged with their audience (or with anything) but rather have appeared, conveniently, to be looked at. Ironically, the art Sivan references in her work has been made almost exclusively by men. The images created by these men are laden with burdens; long-standing conventions of art history, sexual interest and social gender roles. As a female artist, Sivan feels less encumbered by these things. While her awareness of the “traditional” female archetype influences her aesthetic, she takes hold of the freedom to transcend that aspect of art featuring women. For example, in Untitled (Nude), Sivan is in control of all facets of her photograph i.e. posing and placing her model in a contrived setting thus enabling her personal vision of what a portrait or a nude should be: simply a personal investigation of beauty.

Source: Gallery 10G

To see more of Inbal’s work click here