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The Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist
This year The Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist has been presented to three artists: Pavel Wolberg, Leora Laor, and Igael Shemtov. These photographers' works represent different degrees of affinity between art and everyday reality.
Pavel Wolberg (b. 1966, Leningrad) is a press photographer whose work is generally conceived alongside his journalistic tasks. Most of his works touch on current events, on intensive conflict-ridden realities, from which he turns his gaze to the fringe at twilight-to the nightlife, to the club culture, and to social and religious rituals.
Leora Laor (b. 1952, Israel) creates an illusive reality, yet rather than stage her photographs she chooses to document scenes of reality which is staged by dint of its very essence-a theater stage or a dance lesson; alternatively she shoots in such places as Me’a She’arim and a public playground in Jerusalem, which, following photographic manipulation, are perceived as taken from other times, as dissociated from the familiar surroundings.
The landscapes of Igael Shemtov (b.1952, Israel) display a conception subsisting between landscape photography and documentation of a place, a kind of reportage in the landscape. Shemtov formulates local reality with the syntax of high art, and superimposes a stylized aesthetics on the landscape components thus avoiding hierarchical distinctions between them. His perspective aggrandizes the subject photographed, yet it does not enhance reality.
Pavel Wolberg was born in Leningrad in 1966 and immigrated to Israel in 1973. He studied photography at the Camera Obscura School of Art, Tel Aviv, graduating in 1994, and a year later started exhibiting his work. For several years he worked as field photographer for the daily Haaretz, and currently works as photographer for a European news agency. As a press photographer, his works usually result from the coverage of a news event or some other phenomenon. His images are extracted from current events, from an intense, conflict ridden reality of catastrophes, from which he shifts his gaze to the shoulders of the road during twilight, to a depiction of night life, the club culture, and various social and religious rituals, which are inevitably regarded as pathological escapism in light of our catastrophe-filled reality.
Wolberg zooms in with a wide angle lens to "point blank" (the name of his exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2002), producing a gaze that blurs the distinction between the forefront of the occurrence and the photograph's fa?ade. The intrinsic pictorial gazes, those that generate connections between the figures within the frame, are gaping and perplexed, in fact dissolving the potential for any connection whatsoever. These gazes are also turned outward – at the world as formative and at the photographer as one who perpetuates the absurd, violent, helpless or mundane situations.
Wolberg is drawn to twilight and the flickering of nocturnal light, but even in broad daylight he creates a kingdom of shadows with his photographic tools. He shifts the focus from the noise at the heart of the explosion to the silence at the margins of the catastrophe; to the absurd beauty at the shadow of tragedy, to the acrobatic virtuosity inherent in the body's movement at the culmination of a cruel gesture, or to the embarrassed, compassionate gazes accompanying hostility.
Leora Laor was born in Israel in 1952. In the 1980s she engaged in photography in the US and in Israel, and recently, after a twenty year interval, she has returned to photography. In her work Laor creates an illusive reality. She does not stage her photographs, but opts to document realms of an innately-staged reality – a theatrical stage and a dance class, or places such as the Mea She'arim neighborhood and a park in Jerusalem, which, following their photographic processing, are perceived as derived from other times and as detached from the familiar surroundings. The digital manipulations of light, color and texture reinforce the sense of fantasy, placing the photographs on the borderline between photography and painting, life and theater.
Some of the photographs in the various series are digital manipulations of a frame isolated from a video sequence, without the soundtrack which had accompanied the movement on film. In the series "Wanderland", 2003 taken in Mea Shearim, where time stands still, this process further enhances the freezing of time typical of the medium of photography. The series "Images of Light" taken in a Jerusalem park depicts an afternoon scene with pictorial language and romantic notions. Excerpts from the pixelized images taken from a distance are enlarged, generating the illusion of a telescopic view. All these lend the figures an appearance of fragility and loose footing in the space. The pastoral atmosphere belongs exclusively to the background; the figures appear lost in space. In Laor's theater photographs from 2005, time is already metaphorical, and in the dance class photographs, intimacy is but an illusion.
Igael Shemtov was born in Israel in 1952. He studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (1977-1979) and at the Pratt Institute, New York (1983-1985). Since 1979 he has taught photography, and for six years headed the Photography Department at Bezalel. He instructed and advised many classes of photography students, and his influence on current photographic practice in Israel is discernible, inter alia, through them.
Shemtov's photographic perception oscillates between landscape photography and a documentation of a place, akin to landscape reportage. He formulates local reality, which is typified, he maintains, by a low, faint, fervent and sun-struck existential monotony, with the syntax of high art. He applies a stylized aesthetics to rocks, a puddle in a parking lot, a stream running under a bridge, desert sands, the dust arising from a footpath, thick vegetation, mountains on the horizon, and sometimes also to the people passing through the landscape, cars on the side of the road, a quarry in the background.
In his compositions Shemtov does not generate a hierarchy between the various landscape elements; he does not juxtapose a backyard, a travel route, a muddy puddle, and a spring, but rather combines all the visible elements in situ to form an alert, critical, albeit emphatic discussion about the identity of a place and conventions of seeing, about an aesthetic that glorifies the subject of photography, without beautifying reality.
Pavel Wolberg
Contact Sheet #13
Pavel Wolberg
Contact Sheet #14
Leora Laor
nurse
Leora Laor
girls with bags and a sun
