As Good as Real

Liat Elbling’s artist’s book, As Good as Real, takes a retrospective look at her body of work, from the beginning of her artistic path as she wandered with her camera in Israel’s Bneh Beitkha (Build Your Home) neighborhoods, where she captured hundreds of images of single-family homes, and all the way to her contemporary works, in which she creates the photograph’s reality with her own hands in her studio.
The book presents selected works from ten different series of photographs and provides an overview of her creative development over the course of more than a decade. In addition to images of her work, the book offers installation views from exhibitions and also a peek behind the scenes at Elbling’s studio – her raw materials, her work process, and the setting of her photographs.
The home, both physical and metaphorical, is the central subject of her work, and her engagement with it deepens and widens with the passage of time. Using models she builds in the studio, Elbling creates empty, anonymous architectonic environments and spaces. They are generated through the use of basic architectural and geometric elements – roll, cube, ball, column, arch. The relationship between the model’s components, and the play of light and shadow, combine to produce an arrangement of openings, passages, rooms and walls. The act of photographing the temporary models creates for them a possible existence in the real world.
In addition to its breathtaking images of her works and its meticulous design, the book includes three essays: “The Room of the Son and the Daughter,” by Prof. Hagi Kenaan; “There Is No Place that Is Home,” by Elinore Darzi; and “The Claustrophobic Sublime,” by Itamar Levy. Each essay offers a different take on her work, enriching and broadening the discourse about the concept of home and the medium of photography in the contemporary age. The text, which appears alongside the images, makes possible an in-depth, illuminating contemplation of the works and raises compelling questions related to their totality as presented in the book.