How does a book come into the world?
I grew up in Paris. My mother studied classic French cooking, which was just filled with butter. She was an excellent cook. When she passed away, we inherited six bags filled with recipes, most of them handwritten. I don’t like to cook, so they sat in my closet. At some point I gave them to my brother who, at the time, also didn’t really cook. A few years later, the bags ended up back with me. I eventually realized that I had better do something with them. This is how the book came about.
At the beginning of the process, I created two volumes which was the first version of the book. I printed the pages by hand on my home printer and bound them myself. At this point, the book was called “Home Cooking” and so was the name of the exhibition in which I presented it at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv (2005). The exhibition had an installation with a dining table covered with a tablecloth and four copies of the book on it. There were four chairs around the table for the number of people in my family, and the visitors at the exhibition would flip through the books, creating a kind of “family.” The photographer Frances Lebee Nadav, one of the partners of Xargol Publishers, came to the exhibition and suggested that I publish the book. Two years later it came out with Xargul and Am Oved (2007).
So, in essence, you created a body of work that corresponds with and uses your mother’s recipes, especially for a book format?
Yes, I worked on materials, especially for that. As Tali Tamir wrote in the text at the end of the book (“First Course, Main Course, Side Dish, Dessert”), the language of the recipes is very violent. That’s how they talked about food then, “pounding,” “flattening.” As I went through the recipes, I realized that through them I could convey the more complex parts of my family story. I work in series, and I have always presented them together as one body of work. I also created a series for the book and while editing it, I decided to unravel them throughout the book. And so only someone who leafs through the entire book can spot them. It was an interesting process for me that continues to affect my work to this day.
It makes me think about the range between artists who create a body of work with the viewer in mind, and those who first produce images or objects and then think about creating an experience. A book is an object which is meant to be leafed through, so there is always an intention in the sequencing. Where are you on this continuum?
Until I began working with Facebook and Instagram, I didn’t think about the viewer. I did things that interested me and presented them. But over time, the audience has become important to me. I started photographing materials specifically for the Facebook platform and decided in advance that viewers would make an impact. For example, the series “Flowers for Shabbat” came out of a viewer's comment on a photograph of flowers in a vase that I had uploaded one Friday with the title “Flowers for Shabbat.” The comment was, “Perhaps make it a tradition?” That’s how this series was born, and other series were created in a similar way.
This is basically an action like the one you described about the book in the exhibition, of people gathering around your images.
Yes, but in this case it happened online. In the end, it was a kind of reverse process, I created a lot of images for Facebook that I took using the camera on my phone, and which were also suitable for exhibition. The same goes for the images I created especially for the book Family Meal, which I plan to take soon into the gallery space in an exhibition.
Among the series in the book are images that relate to the trauma you experienced as a child. There is something quite “hidden” about the book’s factual level, even though the trauma is very much present in it.
I’m interested in how artists approach trauma in their work. There’s the direct approach that’s like a punch in the face, that doesn’t let the viewer ignore the subject, but might also drive them away. I prefer to leave the viewer a certain amount of choice about how, how much, and when to see it. A lot of people can’t take in things when they are presented directly. It’s important for me to reach wide audiences, especially when I touch on issues that we as a society prefer not to see, as in the case of Family Meal, which between its layers speaks about sexual abuse and incest.
My method is to create what I call a “honey trap.” The works in the book have the character of a journal and they rely on aesthetics. There is a deliberate beauty in the images I create, and the journal approach allowed me to incorporate non-trauma-related photographs into the book as well. These are innocent, everyday images that allow for building up the tension, and this is the trap. For me, the book is structured like a thriller, the more you flip through it and read the headlines, the more the ground gives way, and about halfway through there is a double spread that describes my personal trauma, openly and clearly, to those who are willing to see.
Yes, without the image-title context, it doesn’t elicit the same effect.
Yes. I work a lot with textual connections between images and words. It’s part of my work process.
The book came out in 2007, long before the "Me Too" movement. How was it received?
You won’t believe it, but when the book was published, there were bookstores that placed it on the shelves with the cookbooks. Sometimes I found it in the gift books section and sometimes in the art books. It got to places I never expected and crossed the threshold of the art world. Apart from the art-lover audience, it also reached the circle of social workers, psychologists, and help centers. Dr. Shira Stav, who at the time wrote a review in the literature section of Haaretz newspaper, wrote about it, even though it’s an art book. Despite this, it was a kind of an outlier and was never part of the broader social discourse as it might have been had it been published today.
Would you say there’s something activist about it?
Publishing a book is not like going to demonstrations, but I do see the book as having a social dimension. And it came about in order to bring to the public discourse issues like sexual abuse and incest, which had been silenced over the years. So there is an activist aspect in a large part of my work and also in the book. One could say that whoever looks at the book carefully, can’t cook from it.
All the women in the “Feminist” series in the book are around the age your mother is in it.
Yes, when I think about it, maybe they’re her repair.
As you said, you are about to present a new exhibition in which you return to the materials from the book. Why did you decide to return to these materials?
At the end of 2018, the artist and curator Ayelet Hashahar Cohen approached me and asked me to participate in an exhibition on the subject of the female body and poetry that she was planning together with the poet Tal Nitzán, in the Musrara School of Art gallery. The only materials I had that matched the theme were the recipes with the body parts of the girls from the book Family Meal. I printed and framed two recipes with a body from the book. The result was very powerful for me, and I realized it was time to take the images from the book into the gallery space. The exhibition will be presented at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv. Now, I can probably deal differently with the exposure, and I was interested in going back to the materials from the book and seeing my position 13 years after it was published. As I said, many viewers repress the double spread that speaks openly about my personal trauma as they flip through the book. Maybe precisely because it is difficult to digest and not implied. That’s why the exhibition I’m working on these days is called “Double.”
Tell us what else will be in it?
I have 8mm family home movies lying around in the closet for about 30 years that were taken by my father. I recently converted them to digital format and some of these materials will be displayed in the exhibition. My father was an excellent still photographer, but the films are out of focus and poor quality, which in this instance works for me. There will be more new material that I will only be able to talk about later.
And what about the next artist's book?
I’m thinking about a book that will deal with the whole French part of my history, which I had to suppress when we returned to the country from a seven-year stay in Paris.
Making a book is like…
It’s like giving birth. It really is a very long and complex process. And in the case of this book, it was also my rebirth from out of these materials.
What book should we add to our library?
Merav Shin Ben-Alon has published a new, fascinating, and unusual artist’s book called Five Legs.
Where can readers find your book?
At Migdalor bookstore.
Nurit Yarden, born in 1959, lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo. Yarden has a BFA from the Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. In her works, she combines direct photography with staged photography and deals with the tension between private and public spaces through visual, social, and political symbols. She recently had the solo exhibition: Sojourn - Katamonim at the New Gallery Artist's Studios Teddy in Jerusalem
"The language of the recipes is very violent. That’s how they talked about food then, “pounding,” “flattening.” As I went through the recipes, I realized that through them I could convey the more complex parts of my family story."
"I’m interested in how artists approach trauma in their work. There’s the direct approach that’s like a punch in the face, that doesn’t let the viewer ignore the subject, but might also drive them away. I prefer to leave the viewer a certain amount of choice about how much, how, and when to see."
