Three and a Half Years

We are meeting to discuss the publication of your new book, Three and a Half Years, which accompanied an exhibition in your private studio space, but this is also a chance for us to talk about the other books you have published: Friendship, Safari, School of Birdwatching, Dome, and Buses. Quite a few books, and each very different, so that even if they were published together with exhibitions, they stand on their own and function separately from them.

I am passionate about artists’ books. The process is second nature to me. A book is special—it is a space, and there is something in the intimacy, in browsing it, and its continuity, that creates time and narrative development. I am a storyteller, and I really enjoy the process of working on my books. A book is something timeless. Besides, I have exhibition anxiety.

My first book, Friends, is dedicated to the economy of line, an almost comics-like drawing. The book is organized in a repetitive action—different versions of the same paintings, including Boys with a Snake and Kumzitz (Campfire), alongside images of a tent, a kitchen, and an office. The book forms connections between culture and nature, and has a beautiful text by Dan Daor.

I published Safari in 2001 as part of the exhibition Helena at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion (now, Eyal Ofer Pavilion). The exhibition featured two photography books—School of Birdwatching, which was printed in ten copies, and Safari, which was published as a book. The books were part of the exhibition, like props, and served as a kind of parallel narrative to the installation.

Safari takes place at night and centers on a perplexing, somewhat perverse figure who walks through private gardens and exposes herself in a house wearing only a shirt that covers part of her body. In School of Birdwatching, boys, in a kind of boarding school, a cabin in the woods, develop an intimate bond while discovering a nest of baby parrots and holding a non-talking parrot in their hands. The book included voyeuristic photographs of a sexual act between the two boys.

The entire set was constructed in my studio before the exhibition. A similar but different set was built as an installation at Helena Rubinstein. The books were an integral part of the exhibition, placed on the armchair in the cabin's guest room and in the bedroom, and people browsed them as part of the narrative of the exhibition, even though they were enigmatic and had no explicit story.

Safari was a completely self-published artist’s book. I did the photography, the design, and went to the printer. I consider Three and a Half Years a collaboration with Michael Gordon, a collaboration that is very significant to the book itself.

Creating an alternative world seems to recur in other places in your work. In Dome, which came out in 2007, there is no real linear story, although there is a created world and characters that repeat in a kind of narrative.

The artist’s book Dome came about after a period during which I had been doing a lot of drawing in the studio. I quickly realized that the drawings would work well in a book. The book includes images of the Dome of the Rock on Al Aqsa, the Temple Mount, as a recurring motif—the dome looks like it is sinking between the red-roofed houses. The drawings include scenes of group sex, wounded animals, and lots of blood. The pencil drawings were shown in an exhibition in Rome, curated by Sarit Shapira, and the drawings appear in full in the book designed by Gila Kaplan and published by Revolver, an artist’s book publisher in Frankfurt.

Buses is different from the other books, which really stand on their own. It surveys my installation work over the years. The book was published in conjunction with the Buses exhibition at the Israel Museum, although it does not focus solely on the exhibition, but is arranged chronologically and includes documentation of the projects, a text by Aya Miron, and an in-depth conversation with Sara Breitberg-Semel titled “There is Life in the Artificial,” about my work as a whole.

In the new book Three and a Half Years, the relationship between the exhibition and the book is completely different, despite the fact that both were launched at the same time. It is more like an exhibition accompanying a book than a book accompanying an exhibition.

There is an interesting relationship between the book and exhibition. The photographic medium appears differently in the exhibition and in the book. The exhibition considers photography and its plasticity, expressed in the exhibition in the prints, paper type, scale, and framing. The book is a world within itself—small, focused photographs and a language that references the archive.

Did you start photographing once you knew you had a subject for the new project? Or did that also emerge later?

I knew I wanted to take photos, and I sat down with Lior Tamim, who curated the exhibition, and he recommended a camera to me, and for a long time, he was the one I would send the photos to. For me, he was someone who looked at the photos, but there was no attempt to connect them to something that was a statement. I started taking photos every week, without knowing exactly where I was going and without defining for myself just what I was committing to.

I think it’s most similar to stream of consciousness—I always have a camera in my bag and am taking photos all the time. I stop and observe and deviate from the usual route. I pause, see something, and take a photo of it. I found that I was taking photos of the house, my son, and of texture, looking directly at the light. A kind of journey over several years.

I realized early on that I was actually designating the photos for a book. During the process, I arranged and edited the photos like contacts in booklets, pasting and numbering them by hand, in a very low-tech and rudimentary way, and it became an integral part of my work.

I have dozens of booklets like these at home that are not edited per se, but which already contain thinking and critique. The process started from the very first stages, and the booklets accumulated and became the basis for the book.

The book is very Tel Avivian. It takes place mostly in the neighborhood I grew up in, which is very close to the neighborhood you grew up in, in the old north of the city.

The book is very local, including the decision to have it open from the right, like in Hebrew. I was born in Tel Aviv, and it relates very much to the beginning of my life. All the buildings around where I grew up. A few years ago, I moved to Jerusalem for a short period. When I returned, I noticed they were starting to demolish the houses in Tel Aviv. Entire streets destroyed. The best streets: David Hamelekh, Shaul Hamelekh, Dubnov, Yehoshua Ben Nun, Bloch, Remez. A historical mistake in my opinion.

I don’t work like a documentary photographer of architecture, documenting from a distance, but more like a still-life photographer— focusing, taking close-up photos, isolating details. In each building set for demolition, there are apartments that have never been renovated, preserved since the middle of the last century, apartments and details really waiting to be photographed.

Apartments that preserve the architect’s utopian vision. I am not photographing the Bauhaus and White City architecture, but rather the 1950s and the grey architecture. Tel Aviv was an intimate city in which the balconies had a connection to the outside, with windows immersed in the backyard greenery. A city with verdant paths between houses and shortcuts between the streets. I photograph the houses from the bottom up.

The documentation is also documentation of the collapse of culture and the disintegration of morality. A city that is destroying itself, a city erasing its historical memory. And all of this is happening on the centennial of the vision and outlines of Tel Aviv’s architect and landscape planner, Patrick Geddes.

In the new city of high-rise buildings currently under construction, with balconies just big enough to stand outside on for a smoke, without any trees or courtyards or shade from the sun, nothing— not painters, writers, or birds—will flourish.

A city of underground parking lots, narrow balconies, and everything made of cheap materials. In my opinion, this is a tremendous fracture. I see a direct connection between the demolition of Tel Aviv’s magical buildings and what is happening now in Gaza. A place that erases its history does not tell the history of the other and leads to destruction and annihilation. What is happening in Gaza today is a great testament to the poverty of our society.

As someone who grew up on the first floor of a building on pillars, maybe we are a little nostalgic for the world that was and is no more? The change Israel has undergone over the last decades is enormous, and not just in architecture.

I am not nostalgic. I don’t think every building must remain as it is. A city renews itself and changes, but for that, the Association of Architects needs to sit down and decide what remains and how to preserve a uniform outline and an intimate and human-scale city. Today, I am allergic to this place. The light is too strong for me, the aesthetics are chaotic, everything is very close, and in an endless process of excavation. But the perversion of this place is amazing material for artists. If I had to live in Paris, I have no idea what I would photograph there.

And in the book, too, the decision was not to be nostalgic. When Michael and I were debating the color of the paper for the book, we looked at off-white paper, the kind often used in photography, and we decided to go with white paper that is bright and shiny, as part of this non-nostalgic approach.

For me, the book is also a book about photography and the photographic tradition. This is articulated in the cover showing my bookcase, which fell apart when I moved, with three books inside it: one by Terry Richardson, one by Hans Feldman, and my first book, Safari. It is also a tribute to the legendary French photographer Eugène Atget, who photographed 19th-century Paris before it was rebuilt.

Alongside photographs of the buildings, there are photographs of the human body. Fragments of buildings, and bodies, placed side by side, headless bodies whose skin is burned by the sun. In contrast to the documentary photography of the city, the photographs of the bodies were staged and photographed in the studio, with a makeup artist, everything planned in advance, like in an advertising shoot.

I look at the body the way I look at buildings, the tanning white skin, like a spoiled vacation. The exaggerated tan color on a white person— it’s like a painting.

The book has no text, so understanding the connections—returning to ruined gardens, certain buildings—takes time. Only at the end is there what you call a “catalog”—that gives each work a caption, and captions that group together some of the works—“Buildings before demolition,” “52 Shderot Chen,” “Illuminated Fixtures,” and more. For me, this text was a kind of secret code, clues for to how to read the book.

The editing in this book is very important. This is my first collaboration with Michael Gordon. When I came to him the first time, he looked at the booklets, was silent, and then he said to me: From now on, you will come here once a week and we will start working. It was a fruitful process of cooperation. He was able to listen to what I was doing, he looked at the things and showed me what I was doing, but in a more organized way, like a creative laboratory.

I continued to photograph every week and would go to him once a week, without deciding in advance how much time we would need. Gordon quickly decided on the catalog at the end of the book, which gave everything context. One understands the course of the book through the captions and street names. We also worked with the language editor Noa Shoval on how to condense the captions.

The book is similar to the way I photographed it—a stream of consciousness. I really like that in experiencing the book, the things you encounter at the beginning take on added meaning as you progress through the unnumbered pages.

Another notable design decision was to keep the photographs small relative to the size of the page, with a very large mount. There are 380 images in the book. Enlarging them any more would be hard on the eye. The smaller size is similar to an archive.

How do you imagine the person leafing through Three and a Half Years?

Some look at it very slowly, lingering, concentrating on turning the pages slowly. On the other hand, the book opens like a fan, so I have no problem with starting from either direction. I have no particular recommendation. As long as someone feels something. In the Buses exhibition at the Israel Museum, I could tell in advance, by how the people entered the space, how long they would stay in the installation.

Those who slowed their pace stayed longer. Same with the book—there are those who will open and close it, and it’s probably not for them, and there will be those for whom something in the frequency works, and then they will leaf through more than once. It has so many images that every time you open it, you can find something new.