Sodhom

The book contains photographic portraits of figures from Shimin’s life, her family and friends in their everyday settings, with a photographic intervention by Shimin done at the moment of photography. The themes in the book are many: from the challenging of gender boundaries, through the departure of Shimin from religion and her views of her religious family in light of her secular life, to the vulnerability of hybrid identities.

The 147-page book combines a decade of portrait photography of her immediate surroundings, at different times in her life. It includes photographs spanning from her adolescence to her graduation from Bezalel (age 25). Photographs of her twin brother and religious father in Jerusalem, portraits of places, of figures from the queer nightlife in Tel Aviv and Berlin, liminal situations, scenes depicting the complexity of being an identity immigrant and the search for the boundaries that define identity. The visual charge is the product of Shimin’s way of leading her subjects, in their language, into her own world of images, and to produce a well-developed encounter between the intuitive and the aesthetic. With a photograph that is seemingly simple and direct, but in which is folded a long and complex preparatory work, Shimin tells a story about herself through her subjects.