Don't Take It To Heart

It is my pleasure to host you in the new home of Leafing – Madaf: Books that Are Art, and to interview about your newest artist’s book Don’t Take It to Heart, which was released in January 2023. You are “an artist who makes books,” which is a very special and rare category in our country. To date you have done five artist’s books. In every project you have reinvented the relationship between photography and the format of the book. At the start of an interview, I usually ask how a book comes into the world, but in this case I would love to begin with the question of how you made your newest book?

The book is actually a long concertina book printed in cyanotype. On the outside there is an architectural blueprint of a building I researched in the city of Łódź (Poland), and on the inside are photographs and images connected to my journey to and in it. Each copy was manually printed in cyanotype (sun printing) which is an ancient printing method, in which a light-sensitive emulsion is applied on paper and creates a wonderful blue-color image through exposure to the sun. The book consists of six double-sided strips that make up a long accordion and it was very challenging technically. Besides dealing with the printing on large-size paper and creating seamless connections between the strips, the book was printed in the winter when the dependence on daylight and its intensity affected the exposure conditions, which unfortunately reduced the amount of successful copies.

All your books are “complicated,” meaning they require a lot of manual work. I want to ask, half-jokingly, of course, why do you make life difficult for yourself?

That’s a very good question, also for my therapist (laughs). I like hard work. You can say that it began already in the first year of my photography studies at Bezalel, when I started embroidering on photographs. When I started studying, I wanted to take pictures like Yossi Berger who was the head of the department at the time, and I realized that I couldn’t or wasn’t successful. I found that I was interested in ready-made photographs, that is found photographs, and I slowly abandoned the camera, but I stayed in photography.

I began to break down the images themselves: I was concerned with gestures—how a person stands in front of the camera, the frame, what the limits of the frame are, where the image ends, and what the background is. I worked on the different layers of the photographs using embroidery. I used my embroidery knowledge acquired in childhood, from the craft sets that my mother would buy me to pass the time when I was sick, for example. In my naiveté, I thought that in the small handicrafts I would be able to free myself from the technical and professional demands of the medium. This thinking also went along with the classic frustration of photographers who sometimes still don’t “feel like artists,” which resonated from the seminal texts I was reading during my studies that dealt with the question of photography as art.

To deal with this question, I turned to handicrafts and hard work. My final exhibition included origami, embroidery on paper, a huge wallpaper and some photographs—a collection of things that marked a direction. In the decade after graduation, I experimented in many directions: I started buying photographs at flea markets, continued embroidering, played with rotting jelly in jars, and experimented more with multidisciplinary installations. Among the multitude of crafts and formats, I discovered bookbinding and everything came together while I was studying for a master’s degree at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts).

What actually came together?

The fact that a book comprises a conflict similar to that of the art of photography—it’s commercial, it can be reproduced, but it can also embody the hand of the artist. For example, how I made this book doesn’t allow for the creation of a large number of copies and each copy is slightly different due to the inconsistent quality of the exposures. I realized that I wanted to make art in the form of a book, to dedicate myself to the craft.

When did you start making cyanotypes?

I participated in an exhibition in Holon whose theme was water [Water Affair, Holon Center for Digital Art, Holon, 2021, curators: Udi Edelman and Avital Barak] and one of my first thoughts was to create cyanotype prints because of the color. It felt a bit obvious and clichéd to me, but something in the thinking about the creative process of cyanotype, and in particular, the stage of washing the print and revealing the image, remained. I ended up working with another technique called emulsion lift, where I separated the emulsion from Polaroid photos using water. At the exhibition, I presented a collection of water tanks with photographic emulsions floating in them.

Around the same time I met Rachel Erez who invited me to participate in a cyanotype workshop. The experience with the technique made me even more enthusiastic and realize that I want to use it at the next opportunity. One of the materials I collected in researching the building in Poland, which is the focus of the current book, were architectural blueprints of the building. The way the blueprints were folded led me to thinking about how to fold the book, and the term—“blueprints”—brought me back to the cyanotype. I have done cyanotypes in the past, but in practice this is the first project where I use the technique.

I like that you describe things as a long process of discovery, when in fact, the basic things were there from the beginning. It seems that artists often make the same work, or are driven by a similar principled motivation, which evolves from one project to the next. It is similar to how the family configurations we are born into structures our thematic preoccupation with ourselves. In this book you deal indirectly with family secrets for the first time. Is there any defining scene in this context that is related to the book?

It’s interesting to think of it that way. I think the origin is in the disintegration of the family. I have been taking pictures since I was 16 and right before I started my studies at the Bezalel Academy, my grandfather died and my parents divorced. Both things undermined my place in life and in photography. It was then that I started dealing with family photography. I liked, for example, that in photographs my family is very symmetrical: mother, father, brother, sister, grandparents on both sides. The dismantling of this structure went along with the dismantling of the image and what it represents. During the shiva [the week-long mourning period] for my grandfather, I went through all the family photographs and arranged them in an album and asked myself, what do all these photographs tell now, when the reality does not match what appears in them? That’s where my preoccupation with archives came from. The photographs and objects left after death became a kind of obsession. The practice of archiving began as a practice of disintegration, then of disappearance, and now of secrets.

It’s very hard to be the one who holds the memory for everyone.

You’re right. At first it was fun and exciting, lots of material to make books and exhibitions out of. Throughout the last decade I began losing the ability to archive, and to remember where everything is. I can no longer hold the dead of others. I started to resist.

It’s interesting because the books you make are not only a dismantling of memory, they are a connection and reconstruction of it. The memory you create is very modular, you invite wandering through the archive in a playful way, with a lot of freedom to leaf through it, for example in the series “There’s a story I think I know (folded).״

This is a good example, because in this work I was looking for a way to touch on the complete photographic image, to disrupt it without feeling that I am hurting or wronging it. I fold, cut, combine, and create a new narrative. A book usually has one direction and in these books there are several directions, the photography becomes kind of three-dimensional.

Another significant moment for me was figuring out how to make the series of books “Faded but Not Forgotten,” which comprises six different books where each book produces a different narrative, both in the way it is bound and in its content. The starting point for this work were books I found in the library of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Books that had been donated but the library was not interested in keeping and decided to pass them on. Just before they were given away, I collected the reader’s signs from them: I scanned the scribbles, the signatures, the library cards and stamps, basically every piece of evidence that attested to the book’s use and user. I combined what I had scanned with family photos from my collection. Each book is bound differently, and readers have to discover how they approach the book.

You have to work hard to understand these books.

Yes, there are many clues that connect the photographs and texts, but it requires time and attention. For example, one of the books is folded like there is a mistake in the cover, a mismatch between the jacket and the library card and between the two parts of the image, and everything is colored with a kind of patina of memory and recollection. A lot happens just from the material itself—the covers, the cards, and the photographs, and the time they were originally taken is revealed through the clothes the people are wearing in them and from the faded coloring of the chemicals in the analog photographs. Books are an object that requires touching, and we are used to not touching art. I give the viewer the possibility of contact, but it is deceptive, if the viewer can take it apart, will he know to return the book to its “proper place”? There are books that can’t be put back on the correct shelf, and just like that, they can be lost forever.

You created a kind of history of interfaces in the book.

In the library there were religious books that the library was not interested in either, and they could not be passed on. Those books had to be stored according to Jewish tradition; that is placed in a genizah, in a special room in a synagogue that is reserved for sacred books that can no longer be used, or buried. I wondered how it could be that “ordinary” books become irrelevant, what defines the sacredness that turns them into books worthy of being placed in a genizah? For me, in a certain sense, the signs of use found in a book are sacred signs. This project was born after I dismantled my father’s house, when I found myself standing in front of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, which I knew my father had saved up penny by penny in order to buy another volume of it each time. It is a huge encyclopedia parts of which are filled with knowledge that is no longer relevant. So what is there to pass on and why? The same questions came up for me in photography—when do photographs become irrelevant? Is it when there are no more people left who feel anything about them? And what then?

Your books, and perhaps every book in fact, are apparatuses for evocation, for triggering memory. You revive dead memories, but not necessarily the memories that the photographs or books hold. It is a beautiful Zebladian tension.

Thanks. You have defined beautifully my desire to engage in memory and recollection that is not nostalgic. One of the difficulties with Don’t Take It to Heart was how to use my personal and family story not as a story, but as a way to deal with questions about the research of my family’s past and how it affects us in the present. My family story reminds me of many other stories. We grow up within a national narrative, which places us as part of a community, and creates an identity. There was a point where I discovered that I didn’t know details about my personal story because the general narrative clouded it. This prompted me to research how to tell the story differently.

In the text that opens the book, you touch very subtly on a family secret. Was that hard to write?

I deal with how to position myself in the face of a narrative that I am not fully responsible for. The text indirectly encompasses the moment when I discovered (from a record I happened to come across in the Nazi population registry of the Łódź ghetto) that on the day my grandfather was sent to Auschwitz he had a 4-day-old child. It was a paralyzing moment where I felt there was nothing I could do to contain the flood of emotions. The sentence “This is a record I couldn’t touch,” encapsulates this moment.

Since when have you been involved in your family history in Poland?

This book is a link, I hope the last, in a project that started in 2017, in a residency at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. My father had died the year before, and I was wandering around frozen Warsaw with his ghost, a bit like a crazy person, walking the streets and talking to him. I had flashes of memories, made-up conversations, and started keeping a notebook in which I wrote down moments in order to preserve the memories and the family lineage. I remembered a trip I had made with him in Łódź a few years before, visiting the family’s building, which was then in the process of having its ownership returned/repatriated to the family. He pointed to one of the apartments in the building and matter-of-factly said, “That is where your grandfather grew up.” That was a significant moment when I realized I didn’t really know my family story in depth. From that moment I forced him to tell me everything, and most of what I remember from that conversation is his own frustration from not being able to remember. And here I am again in Poland, he is no longer with me, and suddenly history preoccupies me more than I imagined. The house in Łódź is a concrete thing, which holds the memory of my family that is no longer there. I started researching, and I was hooked.

In 2019, I was in a residency in Łódź, at the end of which I presented a solo exhibition at the Pracownia Portretu gallery in the city. I spent most of my stay in the archive there and exploring the area around the building. The biggest fear was that someone would realize that I was the building’s owner, and this created enormous complexity regarding the building’s present, which stood counter to the historical research I was doing at the same time. The building is located in a neighborhood that is undergoing gentrification and there are many problems related to housing rights, similar to what happens in Tel Aviv and other large cities. The name of the exhibition was originally the address of the building and I decided to change it, because I was afraid of being linked. I felt that I was in a distant and privileged position and that I could not only refer to the past while people lived in a crumbling building. The exhibition at the end dealt with the relationship between the building’s past, my identity as an Israeli homeowner, a Jew in Poland, and the Israeli-Polish present.

And what does all this have to do with the new book?

The exhibition felt incomplete to me without an object that can be leafed through but then came the Covid Pandemic. I had received a scholarship to create a book, but it was impossible to fly. In 2022 between the lockdowns, I traveled with the artist Dana Lev Livnat, the perfect travel partner, to photograph the building. In the time that passed since the previous visit, the occupants of the building were evicted, because it was no longer suitable for habitation. My goal was to find the apartment where my grandfather grew up and photograph it. Despite the information I had, I could not locate it for sure. We entered all the vacant apartments, and we shot like crazy with several cameras and formats. It was totally wild, there were a lot of Jeff Wall-like scenes: a table full of pizza boxes, torn posters, broken furniture, and lots of detritus. With the photographs that came out of there, with the family photographs that I collected, drawings and blueprints of the building from the archive; I built the book. On one side are blueprints of the building and on the other side the blueprint of the story.

The book deals with the work of searching: what it means to spend time in an archive, and how deceptive it is.

Suddenly history, and our inability to touch it, is in the foreground. The inability of any kind of archive to grasp the depth of the historical horror. That’s why it was important for me to mix photos from the whole process, for example from the Skype conversations I had with my father’s aunt. The images are enclosed inside the house in the same way I was during the pandemic—trying to search remotely for information about another time. Searching materials in archives, makes you lose the sense of time, especially when the documents are accessible online. I felt that I could find everything and small pieces of information became another layer in trying to put together the whole picture. Only when I found the record about my grandfather’s son did I stop looking. Suddenly I had found something I didn’t know about him, and in such a painfully concise way: last name, first name, date of birth, and date of transport. I understood that there was no need to search anymore, nothing would complete the story.

Now I have a better understanding of the name of the book. Where did he come from?

I usually work with texts that are ready-made, and in this case as well. As part of the research, I contacted a long-lost relative, a 90-year-old man who, during the war, lived in the Łódź ghetto in a building together with my grandfather’s family. It’s a sentence he said to me at the end of a long and detailed conversation. It was like hearing my grandmother say it. Someone at the edge of the family tree suddenly caring about me. After sharing everything he remembered, and telling me what he had already told countless times, he said “Don’t take it to heart.” But I did.

Who would you want to or who is the book dedicated to?

To my son, Avshalom.

What book should we add next to our library?

Yonatan Vinitsky with his wonderful flip book.

Where can readers get a copy of the book?

Magasin III Jaffa.