“Beauty is . . . not a stylistic property of objects but rather . . . a compulsory sharing of pleasure”
—Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories.
From the book.
1.
"Say Something About the Sea", asks-commands the new book by photographer and artist Asaf Einy.
The book opens with a short introduction followed by three parts. The first titled “Bruises,” contains portraits centered on the relationship between subject and site (and sometimes only the site), taken with a medium format film camera.
The second part, “Thicket,” features images created by service providers in India and Pakistan using smartphones and digital cameras, according to detailed briefs Einy sent them on the digital platform Fiverr during the Corona lockdown period. This section also features an in-depth essay by Dori Ben-Alon that situates Einy for the first time in the local lineage of male, homoerotic photography.
The last section is titled “Be Water,” as in the famous quote of Bruce Lee. It includes two interviews: a verbal one and a visual one. The first is the transcript of a conversation between Einy and the young artist Muhammad Toukhy who appears in the book as well as in Einy’s works over the past decade; the second is derived from a video work by Einy from 2020 (in which the photographer asks the boy Hassan to “say something about the sea”).
Sternthal Books, 2024.
Design by: Ran Ben-Ezra.
2.
The book presents a richness of internal symbolic language that invites endless attempts at deciphering, as if it were a code that can be cracked only by dwelling on the connections between the signs. Should we attempt it through the image of the wound, as is suggested to us in the texts at the beginning and the end? Or through Einy’s biographical story? About his grandfather who emigrated from Casablanca, asked to live by the sea, but was instead sent to a settlement in the south of the country where he continued to create expressions of maritime longing, such as the shell sculptures and the wooden ship that appear in the book?
Is it to be understood through the multitude of repetitive elements that fill its chapters: artificial nature; a parrot; the image of a knight on horseback (the image, according to Ben-Alon, is of St. George); the gestures of the male body, which often appears resting, tired; clothing featuring fashion brand logos (maybe imitation); sleep surfaces (beds, sofas); water in all its forms?
The depths of richness – which bring to mind the multitude of undercurrents found in a large-scale work that was created over years (Say Something About the Sea is indeed such a project) – differ subtly and strongly from the more common fate of the contemporary image. The image we encounter is mostly flattened and delineated, disconnected from sequence and context, from material and texture, a kind of punch line that seeks to convey everything it has in it at once and quickly, before we scroll on.
The key I want to use for exploring the depth of the book is its “extra-literary” component, so to speak, which was relayed to me in conversation with Einy. When we talked about the consistency of the casting choices and locations throughout the book – the lingering on the periphery in its various connotations and the absence throughout of the center, the concepts of hegemonic beauty and power represented in it – he said that his choices stemmed less from an ideological place than they were a product of a longstanding – as he put it – “desire for the ever-day.”
For over a decade, Einy has lived in south Tel Aviv-Jaffa, where many of his neighbors are refugees and migrant workers from Africa and Asia and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. The places that are continuously documented through his lens are the shops, apartments, and hotels nearby where he lives or ones that were specially cast to simulate such spaces.
So, the desire for the everyday.
Desire and the everyday.
Two concepts that are under siege right now. Is it even possible to feel desire in such an existence? Is it possible to exist in this everyday life? Is it allowed?
(And is anything else even possible? Is anything else allowed?)
From the book.
3.
The more I looked for places where everyday life and desire intersect, the more I found the impossibility of their meeting. “We rarely desire what we can have immediately. That’s why we seldom desire the ordinary world. Desire is created when something is just out of reach.” Thus explains a branding expert in the field of luxury fashion.1
In the internal logic of this field, in which Einy has been working for the past decade and a half, the Lacanian concept that sees desire as an essential lack that cannot be fulfilled, perhaps even a product of its being unreachable, is consciously cultivated. It is interesting how this concept is reconciled with the same popular advice for a healthy life, where one is told to get rid of the temptations one craves from your house and your sight! Make them inaccessible! That’s the only way to protect yourself from their lure. I ask, in relation to the cross-section of longing presented in the book: should we remove the objects of desire that stem from our everyday life, or is it not possible to desire the ordinary?
One modern premise describes the mundane as a cogwheel that grinds subjects into an existence of automatism and compromise. 2 Within it, aesthetic experiences – those arising from desire, wonder, or beauty – may appear as momentary flashes that then recede into the grayness of routine, leaving behind only a faint trace.
Alongside these concepts there is also an entire artistic field – found, among other things, in women’s fiction and poetry – dedicated to finding beauty in the ordinary, locating the object of desire in what is already within our reach, in the limits of the domestic sphere. There the writer pauses and gazes at the beautiful vase of flowers; the laundered and starched bed sheets; the soft light penetrating a bedroom window; a pet. After all, what choice does she have? This is not a yearning for some harmful temptation, for the unachievable or the fleeting. It is an attempt to recognize the beauty inherent in the routine and even the mundane.
4.
The transition between these cultural tendencies is necessary, I believe, in order to understand the relationship created between desire and the everyday in Say Something About the Sea, since the book was created alongside and within these, and even responds, adds to, and refutes them.
It responds ironically to the economic necessity of the fashion world to position our desires as something remote, out of reach of our pockets and even (geographically) our physical location. The book dwells deliberately and openly on all those local goods that this world does not include – cheap items (from souvenir shops, from clothing stalls in the local market), boys we don’t usually notice when passing them on the street (if the street is in Jaffa, Petah Tikva, Bat-Yam, Ashdod, or Jisr a-Zarqa).
Einy frames and positions his objects in a way that makes it hard to tell whether what is in front of us is the accessible or the sublime? In the same breath, in relation to the advice to remove daily temptations from the field of vision, the book presents a demonstrative action in which all “harmful” routine temptations are deliberately included in his gaze and hence in ours. In this case, it should be noted, the popular advice is right. The temptations contained in the book are truly dangerous, much more than the snacks I was told to purge from my house. I will come back to this danger.
The book also takes the pastoral-feminine approach of passive contentment and finding beauty in what is already there. 3 It does this, among other things, through the feminization of the exposed and relaxed subjects, as well as the slightly disturbed domestic spheres, whether a hotel in Bat Yam or strange apartments found on Facebook. Living spaces with their own interpretation of the concept of homely.
As mentioned, while to some extent, the images are imbued with the same minor beauty that is hidden in the prosaic object, they also maintain the tension between the daily, the domestic, and the mystical; and manage to resonate an atmosphere of majesty – in a plastic flower arrangement, a red synthetic bedspread, or in the light deflected from an iron grate filtering through a curtain. Of a type familiar to us from Christian iconography, with its revelatory aesthetics that spreads like a spirit across the pages of the book.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the book is aware of the perception of the everyday as wearying and gray and works from this, playing with its elements. The images it presents are fueled by a sense of wonder of the fleeting – a glimpse of the routine, the mundane, which takes our breath away and therefore is most unexpected; that emerges suddenly in the form of wide eyes and a brightly tanned arm on the street, or in the sunlight falling on a wall in a living room – and then fades.
5.
Yes, the magnificence and beauty of the photographs in the book accurately imitate the momentary flash and its intense effect on us, the awakening desire to grasp it, to be suffused in it. But the practice behind them, and actually, within them, is very similar to the day-to-day repetitiveness. This way, and only in this way, is Einy able to reconcile them.
The British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, writes that the idea that any of us can simply live their desire or love who or what they love, or just “manifest their desires in the world and acknowledge them fully and demand their recognition,” is in itself a fantasy.4 This option does not exist. Desire is a complex and painful mix of origin stories, beliefs and imaginings, and it burns like a wound, is dangerous to our very selves, both in its realization and in its non-realization.
Phillips isn't only referring to the inherent lack I mentioned in the sense that the object of desire is always unattainable, but the fact that it is almost impossible to experience it, to be present in it for any length of time, and all the more to express it. And what psychoanalysis sometimes forgets, but a more critical and social view will remind, is that touching and recognizing desire are complicated actions for some of us, more than for others.
In other words, Einy’s desire for the everyday cannot exist literally because it is the essence, complexity, and explosiveness of desire; and yet, more specifically, it cannot exist within cultural and social circumstances steeped in anxiety and hostility directed at the other, whether his otherness is embodied in his sexuality or stems from his belonging to minority groups in general, or the Palestinian minority in particular, in Israel/Palestine.
Therefore, according to Phillips, desire is a matter of staging. As in our tendency to repeatedly produce versions of the same relationship in a desperate attempt to get something from it but not touch it directly, as in our symbolic efforts to direct, cast, design sets, lighting and clothing for a scene of longing. In Einy’s portraiture, desire is given its due as an attempt to re-establish artificial conditions in which it is possible to bear its existence and present it to the world.
It is somewhat like a man who is far from the sea and creates, over and over, little Eiffel Towers out of seashells, or ships carved from wood. And maybe someone who recognizes glimpses of everyday beauty in marginal spaces, surreptitious revelations and refuses to let go of them,5 returns, and dramatizes, returns and searches, and travels as far as overseas, and stages, by means of a brief, in India and Pakistan, brings the staging back to himself, and casts, and directs, and comments, and styles. Seeks to give form and expression to a desire that originates in the everyday, but within it, is not given a place or a glance.
6.
A passion for the everyday and the practice alongside it. The repeated reconstruction and staging. The compulsive sharing of pleasure, as in the quote at the beginning of this essay. It seems as if Einy is compelled to show us what he has momentarily glimpsed, near his home, out of the corner of his eye. He is busy freezing glimpses of beauty, preserving them as souvenirs, as landscape postcards of a sunset. The sentence “Say something about the sea,” which Einy directs to his subject, actually speaks the directive and the plea he levels at himself over and over from a place of desire and beauty itself, as it is found in this place; or at least from what is left of them.
Is any left?
The compulsive repetitiveness stands before and within the terrifying counter-repetitiveness that is exerted from all sides, opposite the repetitiveness that is second nature, and perhaps actually first, of this place. The recognition of the beauty that Einy wants to “tell us something about” endangers the continuation of the project of dehumanization, endangers the blind faith in terrible, murderous violence, and negation of the “other.” It is truly dangerous to confront the subtle repetition that emanates from the book and to feel, even just for an instant, the fullness of love, recognition, longing and sorrow for the one who is standing here, already here, in front of me, so beautiful, too much so, that no one can bear to see him.
Footnotes
- Hannes Gurzki, “Dreaming Up a World: How Luxury Brands Create Desire,” Forbes, 2019. See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/esmtberlin/2019/11/20/dreaming-up-a-world--how-luxury-brands-create-desire/. ↑
- Eran Dorfman, Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014),1. ↑
- Various critical theories have insisted on a multitude of qualities that share certain feminine and pastoral ideals, such as a connection to nature, circular temporality and nourishment, but my intention here is a very specific ethos that the researcher Anne-Lise Francois writes about, of taking what is given to us, easily, but without exercising pressure on the other, or the natural resources, to give it to us. In other words, and in relation to Einy’s book – finding the beautiful in the simple and the existing. Anne-Lise Francois, Open Secrets: The Literature of Unaccounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). ↑
- Adam Phillips, On Kissing Tickling and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) .** ↑
- In the conversation between Einy and Toukhy in the last part of the book, Einy says: “I remember wishing for a photographic figure like you, I literally described your face in words before I met you. And then you popped up on Facebook and I said ‘That’s him!’” And it’s interesting to think whether the glimpse happened in actual reality and then was reproduced over and over as a photograph; or did it first exist as a flash of insight, a wish, and then was discovered in reality and from there dramatized in an image. ↑
Maayan Goldman writes about literature, gender, art, popular culture, and fashion. She previously worked as a stylist, costume designer for art and dance, curator of various visual projects, and fashion reporter. She is currently a doctoral student at the School of Cultural Sciences at Tel Aviv University and publishes essays and articles on multiple platforms. Her debut novel Woman Reclining was published in 2019 by Pardes Publishing.
