The Tear Passages Are Clear

I read the book again before going to bed last night, and dreamt about it. It would be way too much information to tell you the dream, so I will only say that when I woke up I thought about how life is recorded and erased in every kind of documentation and how your book makes this experience present in such a physical way, for me, and I think for many people, The Tear Passages Are Clear was a formative event. How does a book like this come into the world?

The book is the result of years of work. It developed out of entries in my journal, and photographs I took during the 90s and early 2000s, about 15 years in total. I didn’t show these materials in the beginning, I didn’t think they were worth much, I didn’t refer to them much. I published my first book, which I simply called A Book in the Netherlands in 1999 when I was at the Rijksakademie. It was printed at the academy’s printing house. They were the first ones to take my writing seriously and see me as a writing artist, specifically in English, in a Dutch academy. I was 29. 

The withdrawals also began there, an action I did later in Israel in several different places, up to today. Lots of things started in the Netherlands. Publication of The Tear Passages Are Clear was very difficult. The work on the materials themselves was natural and happened matter-of-factly, but releasing the book into the world was traumatic, a bit of a nightmare actually.

Why was that?

First, getting the necessary funding, a sum that seemed astronomical to me. All of a sudden working with graphic designers, which I’m not used to doing. I always actually work alone and make decisions on my own, and I’m not clueless about how things are supposed to look and sit on a page. I had a sketch of what the book should look like, and how the photographs would be alongside the texts, and how there would be a clear rhythm between text and image. Some of the graphic designers responded with ideas that were too pushy and overbearing and I didn’t like them so much, and it was hard to say anything, and things kept changing hands. 

In the end my former student from the Department of Visual Communication saved me, and the book was published thanks to her to a large degree. When the book was in the final stages of printing, I was eight months pregnant with Meron, in addition to having an exhibition at the Dollinger Gallery. It was a period with lots of commitments and stress. The details were very important to me: the type of paper, the print quality of the black and white. I was hoping it would look like printing in a darkroom.

But it wasn’t even close to it. I brought examples of photography books that I like, and the type of printing I wanted, but at the printers, the book is yanked away from you and the machines work and work and run and run, and there’s no time. There is some relation to how I like to print, it resonates with my black, but I had no idea how critical the type of paper is. And I ended up with a book that I don’t much like touching; it came out so glossy, and what is there about me that says glossy?

I thought the grayness of it was very intentional and consistent. Was it supposed to be a different kind of paper?

There was supposed to be selective varnish, the photography was supposed to be glossy, and the rest of the page with the text was supposed to be matte. As for the gray, it wasn’t my intention. I wanted more “black,” and contrast. Of course, I’m happy it came out, I do like some things about it, and it’s accurate in terms of what I went through and who I was in those years.

I also know that it tells a somewhat fundamental story, of someone who goes out into the world, learns, and to whom things happen. And it does that. I once walked into a supermarket in the neighborhood. A mother and daughter came up to me and told me they had both just read the book. I was very moved by the fact that the book speaks to two generations, a teenage girl and a middle-aged mother, and that they would approach me excitedly in a supermarket and ask me questions.  

The mother-daughter axis is central to the book, as is the axis of your father, sisters, and lovers. It reminds me of something I heard from the Israeli poet Efrat Mishori. She once asked in class what we learn from King Oedipus. After we tried answering, she said, “Oedipus teaches that it is impossible to move beyond the borders of family.” You could say that your book is squeezed between escaping and remaining.

Yes, but then I was a little naive. I experienced myself then only in terms of a very nuclear family context and some friendships I had.  When I left for the Netherlands, and my family wasn’t nearby, and I could relax a bit from this, I could see “Noa” without me, and “Noa” with less of the “Sadka,” and all this in broken English, alongside people from all over the world, from Iran, Japan, Belgium. I also don’t like a single-axis explanation. The book at the beginning tells of a time when I was in a state of constant physical anxiety. I would get up in the morning and decide whether to go to my class at Bezalel or get off the bus and go to the emergency room at Hadassah Hospital. And in the second year of school, the situation was unbearable and I left, worked all sorts of weird jobs, went to London, and came back.

Most of the photographs in the book were not taken here.

Yes, at that time, my natural inclination was to travel abroad, the “here” was too hard, oppressive and tight, and “there” I didn’t know anything yet and no one knew me. Most of the texts are from here, but most of the outdoor photography was done in London, Amsterdam, and Poland. There is one outdoor photo of the Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv in fog and of my father in Ein Kerem, at night. It’s hard for me to shoot here, the strong light here is really hard. And it’s also very difficult for me to photograph people, especially ones I don’t know. The act of picking up the camera and shooting has always embarrassed me. And where can I photograph an empty street like that? In Rotterdam and Poland. You know, I always wanted to go to Poland, I really had a kind of bug in my head to travel to Eastern Europe. Then, in Amsterdam I met Arkadiusz, my love, who is from Poland.

Did you show these materials while you were studying at Bezalel?

Not really, I was more interested in other things then. And I didn’t think that self-portraits and photographs of my life and sentences from my journals were worth anything, or worth someone else seeing them. It took a while until I realized that these are my materials and that they have a place, that there is also a tradition and historical place for this kind of work. In my early years, I was obsessed with feminist content. I did body art, I read a lot, but mostly I observed.  I would take tons of books out of the library and just look and look, mostly I was interested in American feminist artists. Before studying photography, I studied literature and philosophy (for a year). But I always have an appreciation and admiration for classic documentary photography. Also the photographs in this book are “documentary,” or as Walker Evans would say, they are in the “documentary style.” It took me a while to realize that this is what I do, and that it was okay.

You could also say that in terms of its format, it’s a reading book, but with photographs. Did it take you a while to make the leap that you are a writer?

It was definitely a big deal in my family. I had always felt very inarticulate and that I have no facility at all with words and language, though I was born into a family where the “word” was of critical importance. My mother was a teacher and researcher of literature, and wrote textbooks about teaching literature, and my father was a linguist. But eventually, my parents valued a “good heart,” sincerity, and honesty more and this is the message I absorbed more strongly over the years.

And I always had a notebook and I always wrote. I wrote and photographed, photographed and wrote. And when I was in the Netherlands, I received a lot of support and space. I was given a studio with a canal view, because as I was told, whoever “writes had better have a view of water.” I also was given an apartment to live in, a budget for materials and even a travel budget. Sometimes I say to myself that even now, 22 years later, I’m still living off the residuals of the money given to me by the Dutch government and the Rijksakademie. I always had diaries with small, dense text. I would copy some of the text on a typewriter, delete parts, rewrite. The texts that made it into the book went through a lot of re-reading and exhibiting. Over the years I would present a sequence of photographs with texts in some exhibition or isolation action, and slowly it came together in the form of a book. 

There is something very coherent in the movement of the text and photographs together.

The things indeed happened in parallel. In the years the book chronicles I always had a notebook I would write in and a camera I would shoot with.  In the book it was also important for me to shake things up a bit, the closeness and pairing between photographing a place and let’s say what was sensed and written in it, to break it, but not too much, and sometimes to break it quickly and harshly. There is no rigid uniformity. I mean I wanted to keep some story, but not chronological. Because I’m also not that neat.

For example, look here. From the crowded page filled with this tiny handwriting, I chose the sentence that became the title of the first part of the book, “How I expected all the time, and asked the street where is my love.” I wrote this sentence in London in 1995. In the book, the verb is already written in the past tense, “how I expected,” because when I wrote it, I had already found my love. It is important for me to be topical. I also didn’t want there to be commas and periods in the book. I preferred spaces. When there’s a space you know how to read it. For example, the line: “Dad washes my dishes   I’m in my room   sweating.” The spaces help. And maybe the spaces are also related to my asthma, I don’t know. There is air, there is no air, the air is blocked. The breath isn’t something that is clear to begin with.  

Like the movement of the camera, which interrupts a sequence.

Yes, maybe, it’s like a contact sheet with 36 images, and then you pick out one frame from it. Although I very much appreciate critical mass and trivial information in art. The materials did indeed undergo refining, and polishing and meticulous attention. The titles are also very important to me. Sometimes it says “self-portrait, train,” and you see that it’s me on the train, you can already identify a train car and assume it’s me. But it’s never rhetorical—the text and image.

In the book, you write and show a sequence of connections and then there is like a jump in one of the lines, and suddenly you realize that something else has started, that you are with Arkadiusz.

Yes. It was also a surprise to me, that I have a relationship that’s lasting and has a continuum. I would take the train from my apartment in Amsterdam to my studio in Rotterdam and ask, “Is it OK that I come over, is it OK that I came?”Arkdiusz would reply that it was sad for him that I had to ask that. No one had ever said that to me before. Ever. Once Arkdiusz walked into an exhibition I had in Amsterdam, looked around and said, “It’s warm.” I loved that one could respond like that to art, “it’s warm, it’s cold.” It was an unfamiliar response. I was always told and taught differently. That one needs to speak and explain, to be verbally eloquent, and actually, my initial venture into photography was because I had trouble articulating myself.   

He also photographs you.

Almost never, most of the time in the book, if it’s not a self-portrait, I ask him to photograph me, it hardly happened naturally. Arkadiusz would say to me, “But I’m not a photographer.” And  I would get a little offended, because for me photographing someone is a bit like loving them, seeing them, noticing. Arkadiusz also didn’t like it so much when I photographed him and felt I was turning him into a model. Photographing him now alone would be weird. I can only photograph him with Roomka and Meron, but not alone anymore. Yesterday Roomka and I lay in bed, and I thought “if I had a camera, I would take some pictures,” but I didn’t have one.  

The title of a book is like a secret. Can you let us in on it? 

The book’s title is a line written by a doctor who reads X-rays and CT scans. At that time, I felt like I had a lump in my throat, and every day began with some medical exam. I had a CT scan of my head and neck, and on the test results the doctor wrote, “The Tear Passages are Clear.” and I took it. I take a lot. I really like texts that come from sources that aren’t considered poetic. I prefer reading dictionaries and old encyclopedias to poetry.

It’s true that when you finish the book, it feels like the book confirms the fact that the tear passages are normal. Would you say there was something cathartic in the publication of the book?

No. I didn’t experience catharsis. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in catharsis. Because things are always accumulating and there is no grounding, it’s as if more is just being added. When the book was published I did an exhibition with the launch. It’s not that I wasn’t happy, but everything was like just barely and on the edge. Even now, after publishing another book, Photographic Truth is a Natural Truth: A Chronicle of a Photography Department (Resling, 2019), which I worked on for 7 years, people ask me, “What's next?” “What now?”  I am in a chronic state of being at the starting point. There is no real memory of what people have already done, no capacity to absorb here, and no condensing of things. I know my book can help people in the world, and I also get feedback like that sometimes, but there is something in the art world here that dislikes this kind of art. 

 But the book has almost run out in stores. Surely that means something.

I guess so.

The cover photo does not appear in the book, a similar one does, but without the cat in your arms. I think this is the only book I’ve seen here, certainly an artist’s book, with such an exposed image on the cover.

Yes. There were all sorts of cover options. But this one won. Look, it embarrasses me a little today, to see myself here at 30, I’m a little jealous of the body I had then. But okay, what was then, it’s in past. In retrospect, I’m happy we decided on this photo. I remember the moment of the photo, the cat I found, that later died. It’s a self-portrait. I had to put masking tape so that the frame would cut the way I wanted. I’m exposed here, but it’s not exhibitionist, and people don’t always know how to tell the difference.

Even when I was a photography student, I remember the discussion would draw conclusions too quickly. “If ... then ....” If “self-portrait” then necessarily narcissistic, and necessarily unclothed. In general “unclothed” is a word I am allergic to, and never use. Each photo must be judged on its own, and it is important to look carefully at all times, and look at the details, and not respond automatically.

As for the self-portraits in the book, we see that it’s a self-portrait because you write in the caption, but there’s no release cable, that means you were working with a timer.

Yes, correct. I don’t like holding a release cable or when you can see the release cable in the photograph. I also don’t like controlling the ten-second moment of the photograph. This is a situation of photography that has intention and even preparation. It’s not a snap decision that captures the moment of photography. And so the moment of photography is actually a kind of surprise, and not a decision. For example, I photographed myself a lot in the London Underground. I was always looking for the empty cars, because I knew there would be a photo shoot situation. And in other places that have a “selfie,” I like to improvise, I find some shelf, table, chair, without a tripod, and place the camera, away from me. And most came out terrible, only one by chance comes out OK. And what I really like and surprises me still, is how those same choices of frames from 20 years ago and more, if I see the contact sheet now, I will choose the exact same frame. It’s kind of unbelievable.

Apropos the receding camera and the third person in the book, it isn’t always clear in the texts who is talking. There’s expression but it’s not certain whose it is. It’s like all the characters are talking inside you, in a way that’s quite disturbing.

It really was a time when I had to say things to myself, to practice being in the moment. Nothing was clear, solid or obvious to me. I had to tell myself that “I am Noa,” that  “I am from Israel,”  remind myself where I come from, what I’m seeing, where I’m going, who I am meeting. And photography and the camera helped me. I felt like a failure back then, shaken, confused, moving from place to place, from country to country, and people’s words sometimes brought me down and sometimes saved me. Documenting this period in words and photography helped me understand and lift me up.

Did you work with an editor?

Adi Soreq edited the book, but there wasn’t much editing work in this case, only corrections here and there, if I remember correctly. But giving legitimacy to this kind of text and photography was important and critical and was definitely given to me by the publisher, and was much appreciated. At the time, I met photographers who had managed to publish books of photography and it seemed like a dream to me. I tried to understand how something like that could happen. I would look at every photography book that came out, and study where they got funding from and what the options were, and then would turn again and again, and write asking for support. I got a lot of refusals and many didn’t even bother to respond. It takes years. At the time, I met with Noa Ben-Nun Melamed who had published a book, and with Shuka Glotman who has been self-publishing books all these years.

So there was even less support than today. There was no Artport or Hansen House Artist's Book Fair. In fact, for photographers it was mostly publishing catalogues, because once there is a budget for an exhibition, something can be done.

There was already the support from the National Lottery and I received that, but there was less awareness also about displaying and selling artist's books. Sources of financial support for artist's books here are very limited, which is why it was important for me that it have a publisher with an organized distribution system. I didn’t want the book to be seen and sold only at designated fairs once a year, and that really happened with the help of Resling. I was very happy that someone bought my book without me at a store in Be’er Sheva. In the beginning, even Steimatzky wanted us to print another edition, but in the end we didn’t. Adi Soreq says that rather than a second edition, I should publish Tear Duct Passages Clear 2 – Age 35 until Now. But I write differently now.

What kind of text-image relationship would you explore today?

I think, something a little less didactic, and less compressed, I am also less able, unfortunately, to recreate situations and dialogues. And I have a few options for books in mind, but I really want to go back to photography. You see, I have a lot of film to develop, a whole box that I haven’t developed in three or four years. Both of my cameras are broken. I have always been a photographer who hated taking pictures. I love photography, but I don’t love photographing. Photographing myself is different, but today I don’t have the same need to photograph myself as I once had.

Why is that?

It helped me to feel that I existed. But loneliness is the basis, it is a necessary platform. It was my foundation.  If I had had a smartphone back then, there would be no The Tear Passages are Clear, I would be some other Noa, because when I was in a room in Prague in the Czech Republic I was in a room in Prague in the Czech Republic. I did not chat, I did not share, I did not participate, I was not included, I was not sent a link, I did not send a link, I did not run away from a link. I was in a room in Prague, in the Czech Republic. Period. Today we are in a nonstop state of noise and commotion. Binging on reaction, action, seeing. Consciousness has become more office-like, we are as if in a kind of huge office actually, bureaucrats of the soul. It is impossible to do things when there are constant interuptions. And doing something good in the world is important.

You also teach a lot. What is it like to be so invested in teaching?

Lately, I’m afraid I’ve lost it, because I haven’t photographed in so long. I haven’t worked in a dark room on my stuff for a long time either. I’m really scared. Teaching has become very central but the way I teach and show materials, and how I collect them, is all very much me. I’m glad I teach and have work. Photography enables me to see how I meet with things, what I see. So, I will always love photography, it relates to reality, it sees things as they are.

What book should we add next to our library?

Ronit Shani’s Heat Wave and Hot City.

Where can readers buy your book?

The last copies can be found at the Resling website and in Heder kri’ah (Reading Room) bookstore.