Time

Dear Taly, I am happy we are meeting the same week as your new book, Time, is arriving hot off the press. You are here with a fresh copy, and we have decided to let the conversation flow from first impressions. No advance preparation, like showing up at a new location with a camera. We will leaf through it and pause for some reflections along the way.

For those who don’t know you: You have been involved with photography for decades, teaching photography, writing about exhibitions for newspapers, curating exhibitions in galleries, and mentoring artists. You are publishing an artist’s/photographer’s book at the age of 74, but the book is not a comprehensive summary of your body of work. You wrote in Head Start that it would “give expression to those moments of surprise that can come with the click of the shutter or from long preparation.” So why now?

The short answer is that I have reached a stage in life where I want something to remain. You install an exhibition and then take it down, whereas a book remains. I am a perfectionist, so this has been a very challenging production. As you mentioned, I did crowdfunding, which, it turns out, is quite hard. I raised half the amount and took out a loan for the rest so that the book would be exactly what I wanted.

The long answer is that I am old :) Look, all my life photography placed obstacles in my way. I grew up in a house with music and art, but contrary to the standard stories of photographers, no one bought me a camera for my birthday when I was little. I came to photography on my own, after a divorce, with a child at home, and I wanted to study it. I started with black and white film, and while I had always been a writer, I loved it. Photography seemed the perfect way to see the world as a mirror.

Later, I also shot with color and digital. In recent years, because of the cost and the weight of the equipment, it has become more difficult to shoot with film. I am not in love with my digital Sony. It takes beautiful photos, but it’s less personal—it’s pretty, or not. I also miss the core, the materiality of the film. Today, there are groups like Darkroom for film lovers, and analog photography is making a comeback—every few years it makes a comeback—but practically, it’s getting harder. It sounds unrelated, but it’s about time, like the title of the book.

Your generation has gone the whole way from darkroom to AI, which is actually a new medium for creating images, and which we will not call photography. There are no hierarchies among the techniques in the book, and because the photographs are so wonderful, and also the size and quality of the printing, one can enjoy the sensuality of each frame without wondering—analog or mobile? Many of the photographs in the book have not been shown anywhere before, correct?

Yes, because it is about truly understanding the essence of the photographic language. In my last year of study, I started teaching at Camera Obscura. Philip Perkis, one of the people I admired, came from the Pratt Institute to teach over the summer semester. I owe a lot to that encounter because he was the one who taught me about the infinite depth of simple black-and-white film. The darkroom became a place of creation. Then came the next millennium and a student announced to me that film would soon disappear, and that was that. At that time, I was doing a lot of landscape photography. I was looking at details as things in themselves, detached from their concrete presence.

At some point, I had to turn to the 6x6 format and color film. In the bigger world, especially in Europe, typological photography gained a presence and I was very attracted to the possibility of looking at something with a clean, seemingly detached, frontal view, but thinking about its historical uniqueness. I wanted to observe with an investigative eye the endless repetition of our lives here—I had no idea yet how endless it was and how easily one could return to square one.

Then, a group of teenagers who had immigrated from Russia were absorbed into Kibbutz Jezreel, in the heart of the famous valley, and they became something to observe. They looked like my aunts and uncles who came from those same locations in the thirties, and I placed them against the backdrop of the valley landscapes.

They staged themselves as if seventy years had not passed. I tried to talk about representation and the connection to the Eretzisraeli landscape of the Land of Israel. The tension between myth and setting. This typological observation became a series of frontal portraits in my first solo exhibition shot in color in 6x6 format. Tali Tamir, the mythological curator of the Kibbutz Gallery, wrote very beautifully about the project. Later, she invited me to present another exhibition that addressed the layers of memory of the Arab village Zir’in, where I also presented the video work “Well.” All of this energized me for several years. The color, the large format, I had to be in it, and then also to return to black and white.

It seems you have collected many photographs over the years, and have almost insisted on not showing them…

The Kibbutz Gallery represented me at that time, and when it closed I showed at the Artists’ House. I quickly got tired of short-lived exhibitions, and with a few exceptions, I focused mainly on journalistic writing for my living and pleasure. But I have been photographing all along and at a certain point I had to give myself a clearer answer to the question of how to formulate a statement about what is happening in reality through my personal / emotional / critical expression.

Whether an exhibition or a book, in photography we build series. When it is tight and correct, a series clarifies many things. Everything fell into place with this book. The choice of photographs was not easy because I photographed things that do not appear to fit together: nature museums, small details from Renaissance and Dutch paintings, landscapes, and things in nature that do not belong to one single category.

That’s how the book became an essay. I realized that all these years I’ve been creating equivalents for an emotional mindset and critical stance towards the way people, including us, misappropriate our role in fighting for all the good that is bestowed upon us.

Since you mentioned journalistic writing, I can’t help but ask, why did you stop writing in the press?

There came a moment when it became impossible. I started writing right after school in 1985. I wrote because I know how to write, and my writing was from a place of love. I wrote about what interested me and I had a real and naive desire to bring people closer to art. People would tell me, “You made me want to go to see the exhibition.” For me, it was a huge achievement. I started with magazine articles in the newspaper Davar, and when Yedioth Tikshoret, the first local newspaper of Yedioth Ahronoth, started, I was there with reviews of photography exhibitions. To supplement my income, I would proofread at night and teach during the day. Then my editor, Amnon Rabi, invited me to the newspaper Ha’ir. I continued there with art reviews and eventually wrote at Ynet for a few years. At some point, I felt that I didn’t want to deliver the goods anymore and I didn’t feel like being harshly critical of artists.

At the same time, I was already deeply involved in the work of curating. I was interested in gathering a group of artists around themes that came to my mind. For example, the exhibition Europe, Europe, dealt with the conscious and unconscious connections and longing we all have for European culture (this was years before this longing was embodied in the passport) and also with our limited possibility of openness to the world, which we were not fully aware of until October 2023.

Or The Death of the Editor, a partly-amusing, partly-critical exhibition of the Ministry of Education’s contemptuous stance towards humanistic studies. When we moved to the north, I was invited to be the chief curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery and I dove into the role for seven wonderful years without any prior preparation (as you already said, photographers know how to do that). Later, I moved to Oranim College Gallery, which was a home that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. There I also combined the exhibitions with teaching curatorial studies, which was great fun. I think I am a good curator.

At the same time, I was already deeply involved in the work of curating. I was interested in gathering a group of artists around themes that came to my mind. For example, the exhibition Europe, Europe, dealt with the conscious and unconscious connections and longing we all have for European culture (this was years before this longing was embodied in the passport) and also with our limited possibility of openness to the world, which we were not fully aware of until October 2023. Or The Death of the Editor, a partly-amusing, partly-critical exhibition of the Ministry of Education’s contemptuous stance towards humanistic studies. When we moved to the north, I was invited to be the chief curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery and I dove into the role for seven wonderful years without any prior preparation (as you already said, photographers know how to do that). Later, I moved to Oranim College Gallery, which was a home that allowed me to do whatever I wanted. There I also combined the exhibitions with teaching curatorial studies, which was great fun. I think I am a good curator.

Yes. Photography takes things out of context and turns them into a representation that supposedly teaches something, but it doesn’t really teach. The pages remain blank. The absurdity I experience in my work is that the more I photograph, the less I understand. I remember the moment of photography, but it is false in relation to the result. For me, photography is not a history lesson.

It is interesting that although the book is almost devoid of human figures, in most of the landscape photographs your gaze isn’t nostalgic and it is also difficult to say that your subject is “absence” or “traces.” The anti-romantic gesture that Tali Tamir wrote about in the 1980s in relation to your photographs of the Jezreel Valley continues in the photographs here but in other, more subtle forms. And this is not to say that there is no delicacy and tenderness in the compositions. But, for example, you cut the horizon, photograph from so low that the ground dominates, or from above something placed on the ground. Often the view of the landscape is blocked by fog or a mountain range. It is as if you are avoiding getting to the “edge of the cliff.”

You raise an important point here and I have several possible answers. First, I try to look at a place as if “for the first time.” Today, we are used to looking at a photograph for, at best, maybe 2 or 3 seconds. I try to confront this parsimony and say that it does not make sense. If there is something combative in my photography, it has to do with time. Second, regarding the matter of “absence” you mention—as we have already learned, it exists at some level in every photograph.

Not only because what was photographed is no longer there, but also because the subject taking the photo has already gone. That’s why you were right when you said that my interest is not necessarily absence. Third, there is the issue of the observer’s position. Throughout my studies, I had only one female teacher, Ronit Shani. All the others were men. Unfortunately, some teachers allowed themselves to get too close and to invade the private space of female students.

I kept my distance. I tend to believe that my experience studying at HaMidrasha strengthened the more silent side of myself. From the beginning, my perspective was of an observer watching from the sidelines. I tried not to overpower, but to sharpen my perspective and raise questions about ownership. I observe things for a long time, for example, the photograph of the shipwreck took me a long time to plan and find the right distance. In the end, I almost always stay “in the background.” Before the edge.

As an ethical position?

For me, this is a natural place. But yes, an ethical position. I don’t attack. Even the taxidermy animals I photograph, I try to show their immortal silence. Again, this is not to teach anyone about the real world; it says something about what we can do with our gaze. By the way, in preparation for our meeting this morning, I found myself writing something else about the book. Shall I read it to you?

Sure.

“My photograph: a pathetic moment in which I attempt to take ownership of something that no one before me has taken. It is pathetic because there is no ownership. I don’t look into real eyes, but into glass eyes, nothing is looking back at me. An exception is the frontal portrait of my sister and me, which was naturally joined by an old reproduction portrait of a woman on the wall behind. Which became a painted moment in history that we both forgot (it is gone). It has long passed. In several of the photographs, I look at people looking, trying to preserve, to tell a story. The sometime invisible presence of humans is important in the book: they are guides, they try to tell the story of the mute animals, for example, in all sorts of ways: science, art, nostalgia. All this while the story is elsewhere.”

I wanted to ask about your sister, but instead, I will ask about the “other places.” I will say that there are no headings, dates, or titles for the photographs in the book. Can you offer a clue about where you took them?

Mainly, I am drawn to the strange. To Nordic lands. It is elementary to be drawn to the strange. I went to Iceland because I thought it was the best way to get to something near the moon. The book created connections between the strange and the familiar. The Black Forest on the German-French border and the huge pile of wood chips on Givat Ela. A detail from a 17th-century painting, and a portrait from a local newspaper.

You mention paintings that you photograph, and it’s impossible not to think of John Berger’s seminal text “Why Look at Animals?” in which he surveys the history of the human gaze on animals and the role of the camera. Your book is interwoven with photographs of animals of various kinds: some from paintings, some that look like paintings but are actually direct photographs. Among the many insights, Berger writes: “The treatment of animals in 19th-century Romantic painting was already an acknowledgment of their impending disappearance. The images of animals receding into a wildness that existed only in the imagination” [John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, 15)]. Absence again?

There are two things here, which touch on each other. One is the question of photography as “reviving” what is dead and gone. Then there is the question of the gaze. In natural history museums, I wandered among taxidermic animals and tried to understand the motives of those who preserved them. The animals look at you with glass eyes and when you photograph them, a strange thing happens: the photograph, itself a freezing and a replication, suddenly returns a living gaze to them. It’s strange and wonderful, but I bring the dead to life. Something similar happened when I photographed a detail of hunting dogs running in the snow in a Rembrandt painting. Suddenly they are really there, running, leaving tracks in the snow.

I worked intuitively. I had no idea what photography would do to it, but it did. Then fleeting human glances enter the book. Snapshots. In the end, it flows into the finality of life, or the many attempts of the human race to fight this indignity, with every possible invention.

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk deals with this brilliantly in her book Flights. The book is a wonderfully organized mosaic of stories, some true and others invented. For example, a story about the sister of Frederic Chopin, who after his death carried out his last will and carried his head under her dress all the way from Paris to Warsaw so that the head could be buried in his hometown. By the way, I wanted to quote from the book and I also got permission from the Israeli publisher, but the British publisher kept delaying permission to use the English translation, and I didn’t feel like dealing with them anymore. Since Time has an English back cover, I gave up.

Speaking of things omitted in the editing—did you edit the book yourself?

The editing presented me with so many dilemmas that I had to take a step back. Contrary to what one might expect, I sent my final choices to Guy Sagi for another experienced and fresh eye to handle the editing. We started working from his outside perspective. We learned many things during the process. It was a wonderful experience. The cover was the one thing I insisted on. I thought it had to be black and he said “Black?! It’s a photography book!” But in the end he went along with me, and made truly beautiful typography for the word “Time” on a black background.

The cover is black and the pages are white :-) We’re back to the beginning with black and white.

I went back to my little Sony digital and I will probably do black and white conversions in AI. Something to look forward to...

Finally, as always, making a book is like…

Composing a visual vocabulary that exists within you into something someone else can read.

To whom did you dedicate the book?

To my family. My partner, Alon, who has been steady and supportive throughout the process. Unlike me, he also knows how to calculate costs. This project, through Head Start, forced me to lay myself bare after a very long time, but the unexpected response I received was warm and encouraging. It is very exciting that it succeeded.

Who should we invite next to Madaf?

I keep returning to Noa Ben Nun Melamed’s book Atlantis published in 2022 following her solo exhibition at the Ein Harod Museum. It is fascinating to be exposed to Noa’s consistent development, from book to book and exhibition to exhibition.