Yesterday´s Sun

Uri Gershuni

2012

The book returns to the origins of photography to meditate upon its future.
Gershuni traveled to the home of photography’s inventor, William Henri Fox Talbot, in Lacock, England, where he photographed Talbot’s home and its environs. Gershuni transformed his digital camera into a pin-hole, producing long exposures that resulted re-capture a materiality eluded by the reproducibility of digital photography. Gershuni’s frames capture elements of surprise – stains of light – amongst other motifs, that resemble the remains of some invisible ghost. Interspersed amongst these grainy epitaphs are a series of nude photographs featuring a young man posing in a stark room. We know nothing about him, or of his relationship to the images that surround him, other then that he goes by the name Bambi. Regardless, there is a strong dialogue between Gershuni’s subject and the barrenness of Lacock, one that enhances the eroticism of this strangers presence.
The resulting work is a powerful visual allegory that fluctuates between past and future, father and son, absence and presence. This continual back and forth – between photography’s deceased master, and the vitality of Gershuni’s young subject, between the coldness of absence and the intimacy of live flesh – sheds light on current anxieties over photography’s hypertrophy – its increased proliferation and the simultaneous retraction in its ability to transmit meaning.
It also calls our attention to the artist’s own search, perhaps, for a father figure of his own.
The book features essays by Rotem Rozental and Nissim Gal

  • Copies: 1000
  • Pages: 168
  • Type of binding: hardcover
  • Dimensions (cm): 28 x 22
  • Printing: A.R. Printing LTD
  • Binding: A.R. Printing LTD
  • Type of printing: Offset - Duotone
  • Publication: Sternthal Books
  • Place of publication: Canada
  • Supported by: Israel Lottery Council for the Arts, Shpilman Institute for Photography, Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art
  • Book photography: Yair Meyuhas
  • ISBN: 9780986483585