Backroads

Shiraz Grinbaum: Dear Daniel, it's so nice to have you in the magazine. We've known each other for many years, and I was delighted to be featured in Exposure, Haaretz's photography blog, which you initiated and have been editing for thirteen years. It's exciting to be on the other side and take the time to look at your work. It was interesting to see your two previous books, Sunburn and Dark Waters, alongside your new book, Backroads, to see how the three work together, in terms of themes and your gaze, which has evolved but remains very true to itself. I always start with the same question: how is a book born?

Daniel Tchetchik: There is a poetic and spiritual narrative here that aims to reflect the significant transformation our world has undergone in the last decade. Three and a half years ago, Sofie Berzon MacKie invited me to participate in an artist talk at an exhibition by photographer Etai Bar-Yosef at the gallery in Kibbutz Be'eri. It was the first time I met Sofie (the curator of the gallery) face to face, and we immediately found a common language and deep understanding, a very strong and quick connection.

Shortly after that, she invited me to display a solo exhibition at the Be'eri Gallery, scheduled to open in April 2024. That gave us 15 months to work. I really like long processes, but because of the nature of my journalistic work, I often work on tight deadlines, and I was very happy to have the opportunity to work with a curator I admire in a time frame that allowed me to produce a significant body of work.

We began with meetings and delved into my personal archive together. When I edit my own material, I almost always think in series, and Sofie decided to shake things up, as they say. She made geographical and intertemporal connections, a move that, in retrospect, I knew something inside me was screaming to do.

Did you know this would happen with the exhibition catalogue, too?

Yeah. It's well known that making catalogues is a proud tradition at the Be'eri Gallery, and while we were putting together the exhibition, we started thinking about the catalogue, which ended up becoming a book in its own right because of how things turned out. I told Sofie that I wanted it to “start from the end.” I kept saying, “There's a countdown here,” and she asked, “A countdown to what?” And the most obvious thing I could answer was, “To darkness.” I told her that the exhibition was a “celebration” of darkness, a utopian moment of darkness. I even started a series on my Instagram where I counted down the days until the opening.

Wow. But the exhibition, Days Before Darkness [2024], didn't open at the Be'eri Gallery in the end.

That's right. Five months before the exhibition was supposed to open, October 7 happened. On Friday, October 6, I traveled with my partner to a festival in the north, and I took my camera with me. I don't usually take spontaneous photos, but that day I photographed the beautiful sunset falling on the curtain in the room. It happened to be the last frame on that roll, and it turned out almost completely dark. That's the photo that opens the book, the last sunset on the old world.

On October 7, like everyone else, I woke up to the videos. I immediately told my partner, “This isn't real,” and she brought me back to reality, that it was very real indeed. I immediately sent a message to Sofie, who was at her home in Kibbutz Be'eri. She replied that she didn't know if she would make it out of there alive. After that, I didn't hear back from her, and around 2:00 p.m., she posted a farewell message on Facebook.

As fate had it, she and her family managed to leave the kibbutz at 2:00 a.m. They were driven north. I went to visit her a few days later. I sat with her for a few hours, listened, and cried a lot. Before I left, I hugged her and told her I loved her. She replied, “Daniel, I haven't forgotten about your exhibition.” I answered, “Don't embarrass me,” and she said, “It's very important to me. I want to get back to work tomorrow morning.”

And so it was. Raz Samira, the head curator of the Eretz Israel Museum, called a few days later and offered a large space at the Eretz Israel Museum within three months. The exhibition was 85% ready. We enlarged some of the works from the original intended size and put the entire budget into production, at the expense of the catalogue, which we didn't have time to prepare.

It was an extraordinary opening, with hundreds of people, and a crazy storm outside. It was Sofie's first exhibition as a curator after October 7. People stayed in the space for a long time, looking at each photograph for a long time. It was a very powerful experience for me, the lingering. It felt like the exhibition touched a raw nerve and also provided a space for meditation.

When the exhibition closed, Sofie said, “We have to make our mark in the world of books,” and I knew that making a mark costs money. She said, “It'll be okay.” She listened to all my whims, offset printing, manual gluing (her idea), and printing on the most suitable paper. I called Roei Regev, with whom I had worked for more than 10 years at Haaretz. He is a wonderful designer who contributed on a philosophical and narrative level. It took a long time to develop the concept. At first, the book was called "Days Before Darkness," but at a certain point, we realized we would break the sentence into three parts, which became the book's chapters: "Days," "Before," "Darkness", and the book would be named "Backroads".  

Where did the phrase "days before darkness" come from?

When I finished Sunburn, a book about the effects of the Middle Eastern heat on human temperament and the landscape, I wanted to explore the opposite climate. I approached the editors of Haaretz and the Swedish Embassy to put together a new project. The process was long, and in mid-October 2017, I was approved a budget for the project, but was warned, “Just so you know, these are the last days of light before the long darkness of winter.”

I landed in Kiruna, in northern Sweden. As I got off the plane, a large sign indicated that it was minus 20 degrees outside. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and it was dark outside. In Sweden, the days get significantly shorter, with almost an extra quarter of an hour of darkness every 24 hours. Life goes on as usual. I rented a car, put my film in the room, and went down to the local bar.

There, I realized that the falling darkness was my narrative. I remember writing on a napkin, “days before darkness.” The pursuit of the last light. The sentence I wrote opened up a new channel for me. There, in northern Sweden, I surrendered to the darkness: to the gentleness, the slowness, the magic of the falling snow, the world lit by candlelight.

When I returned to Israel, I shared the material I had compiled with Moran Sharir, a senior journalist and the head editor of the weekend edition at the time. We understood that beyond the cyclical nature of darkness, there was something metaphorical here: the climate, the social situation. Sharir connected me with a writer in Sweden, David Stavrou. It was the first time in the newspaper's history that an article was written for my visual story, rather than the other way around. He researched the darkness, the depression rates, and the art. The article is a true curatorial text, not a news item.

We got the cover of the newspaper that weekend, which was a defining moment for me. "Days Before Darkness" became an umbrella under which I created many series. The tension between the journalistic story and the personal story became the center of my work. I began to propose ideas for photo essays based on this tension.

Based on what you're saying, it's really clear when you flip through it that even though it's divided into chapters, the book is put together in a really intuitive way, and the overall experience is that it's a book about your perspective, about traveling, and about searching for the story.

What you say takes me to the story of the map that appears in the book. When I was a child, my family had a house in upstate New York, a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Boston. It was a beautiful two-story wooden house with huge windows overlooking Lake Champlain—a dream.

How did the family get there?

We wanted a vacation home. My father, who passed away many years ago, decided to embark on a year-and-a-half journey to find the right house. Every weekend, he would throw us in the back seat and drive us to all kinds of remote places. As a child, if a house had a basketball court, I loved it, and if not, I didn't. In the end, we found this house, which became a family sanctuary, with guests coming over, childhood friends coming for the summer; we played basketball, soccer, baseball, swam in the lake, sailed, and hosted dinner parties. The place became part of the family's DNA. In retrospect, that house had a huge influence on what I do.

This book, among other things, is a physical and metaphysical journey of a child who gets into the back seat of a car. Through his eyes, a five-and-a-half-hour drive is the whole world: looking out the window, the colors changing between October and November, the clouds, and the rain. These sights awakened my inner world and also shaped my personality in many ways. Back then, there was no Waze or Google Maps, so my father drew a map explaining how to get to the house. The map included the side roads we had to take to find the place. At one point, we wanted to put this map on the cover of the book, but then we changed our minds.

Now I understand the title of the book, Backroads, not only “back roads” but the roads you see from the back seat... What you describe connects me to the most fundamental question in documentary photography, the question of place. You choose not to mention the places in the book, unlike journalistic photo captions, which always include place and time. This is a recurring theme in all your books.

It's a choice that leaves questions open. For example, in the project following the refugees who came by sea to Europe [Dark Waters, 2019], I chose to focus on the Mediterranean Sea—the bridge between Africa and Europe. Mainly on the hidden meanings of a stormy sea, a sea of sadness and death, and of hope.

The question of whether I had to photograph it “there,” that is, on the shores of Europe, is a good one. I think there needs to be a dimension of faith in the abstract. That is, it is important to be in the specific geographical space where invisible frequencies dictate the spirit of the work.

Yes, and in this sense, a book is an excellent medium, because the accumulation of material within it thickens the framing. We know, for example, that the book deals with the refugee crisis, but other than that, there is not much information about locations.

When I don't specify a location or time, I try to focus on universal experiences rather than individual ones. In my work, you will find it difficult to identify any specific locations. I aim to take the viewer on a journey to an “other” place. It is not a tangible place, but an imaginary, emotional sphere, detached from the constraints of space and time.

You are essentially folding secrets.

I think every work has a secret. By the way, there is a hidden poem in the book. Anyone who picks up the photograph on page 47 will find a poem underneath it. I try to show concepts in photography that are difficult to illustrate. In this sense, the book is like a changing amorphous entity, open to many interpretations.

Let's talk for a moment about your inspirations. It's not hard to identify the influences of very masculine American photography, which deals with nature, frontier areas, and brings the extreme experience of the lone photographer “home.” Is this an ethos associated with the photographers you are connected to?

There are two photographers who have greatly influenced me, and they are very different from each other. The first is Trent Parke, an Australian photographer with the Magnum agency. The second is Wolfgang Tillmans, a German photographer. Trent is a “manly man,” straight, macho, who traveled around the Australian Outback for years, shooting in black and white film in order to capture the spirit of his time. Tillmans, on the other hand, is a refined German who deals with sexuality and homosexuality, parties, and city life, as well as the abstract and the experimental in photography. There is no connection between them, but I feel that my work and my personality are a mix of both: the here and now and the artistic.

If we go back to the beginning of the 20th century and the American ethos of nature, then of course the photography of the F64 group had a major influence, as did Edward Steichen, whom I have come to appreciate more and more over the years as a great philosopher of photography. When I started out, I was very faithful to nature; I wanted to “reflect” it. Gradually, a kind of “disturbance” began to appear in my photographs. I began to explore elements of disruption, something that is crumbling, transforming. Life cycles.

It's interesting because you really feel this dichotomy. On the one hand, you feel that you are in love with the ethos of grandiose, very masculine American photography. On the other hand, you are actively working to “wake up” from this infatuation, to be critical of it. This brings me to the cinematic quality of the frames, for example the shot from inside the car. It's documentary work, but it feels so cinematic, almost staged. A kind of gesture to Gregory Crowdson.

You raise an interesting point because it touches on a key element, and the shot of the car is really pivotal in this context. The movie Stand by Me is one of my favorites; I know it by heart. In the last scene, the protagonist is sitting in the car. That's the frame for me. It's a lost frame from the movie; I can hear the soundtrack in the background. For me, this is where I write the visual story of my life. Wandering around and finding the cinematic, fishing for that frame “from real life,” is much more interesting to me than directing. I don't remember where it was filmed, maybe in Montana, but for me, the house in the background is my childhood home. I'm in the parking lot there with my friends.

This is also related to my father, because he is always there, in the home upstate. He took a lot of pictures; there were always rolls of film at home. He was a good photographer. I don't know if he missed his calling, but I'm sure he would have liked to do more of it. He was a computer engineer, a very mathematical man. So yes, the fact that I shoot with analog cameras, beyond the obvious reasons, is also a tribute to him. A kind of memorial that lasts a few seconds. If I get tangled up with the film, then that moment lasts a little longer.

And you dedicated the book to him.

Yes. Photography interests me today from a research perspective. Analog photography is a tool for translating and searching for truth within space: exposure times, speeds, and contrasts that cannot be seen with the naked eye. This is the last value that remains for us, and I cling to it like a lifeline, because they have already destroyed almost all of our romanticism. I still believe in this, and I hope it will remain.

I often return to a photograph I took more than 20 years ago, which reminds me of the camera's capabilities. On a cloudy day without sun, I exposed a stream against a forest backdrop for five seconds. In those five seconds, the sun broke through and brought light where there had been none.

Speaking of creating a world, let's pause for a moment on the fact that this is the first time you're publishing poems... When did you start writing?

The words were always there, but I was too afraid to publish them. I'm 50 years old, and I decided to publish the poems. I love writing, but unlike photography, it's a medium that “reveals more about you.” The poems in the book are small moments, twilight hours, times when I feel the need to photograph, small echoes, flashes.

What do we see on the chosen cover?

The cover features the weather vane photographed in northern Norway, which appears again inside the book. Sofie wrote about the image as a “key figure” in the exhibition: “The visual journey essentially consists of a departure from a world of symbols with clear contours, distinct shapes, or specific anchors of time and place. The trees are crumbling, and fog descends on the horizon. The surface is scorched, a compass rose creaks on the roof.”

We can't go without mentioning the photography blog Exposure that you initiated in Haaretz newspaper, which has become very successful. It seems to me that you are among the people who best understand the photography in this country. What have you learned from this endeavor?

The blog constantly broadens my perspective. For example, regarding the journalistic dilemma: an amazing story that is poorly photographed, or a bad or non-existent story that is amazingly photographed. For a blog that focuses on photography, the assumption is that amazing photos will take precedence over the story, but I take the opposite view. I will choose the important story over the image.

I try very hard to keep the blog local, with about 85% of what is published being the fruit of work done in Israel. This framing makes it significantly more difficult, but I believe it adds layers of identity to our followers.

Which book should we feature next in the magazine?

Tchelet Ram's new book.