Adi Louria-Hayon / Objects of Desire

Fantastic, abstract imagery often serves the conscious as a memory or an obscure and vague object of desire that our imagination strains to capture. The human will to comprehend the elusive image as a complete object result in a disability rooted in limited perception while stressing the constant striving toward the unfathomable. This attempt to elaborate on the bounded yet unbounded human condition has been a central concern for philosophers and theologians who sought to define the individual's place in relation to the universe, the forces of nature and God.

Israeli photographer Leora Laor binds these phenomena of perception with human ephemerality displaying digital stills situating human figures on the enigmatic seam line bordering life and death, reality and dream, routine and fantasy. Laor deals with the tension between the limited and the un-limited, the finite and the infinite, urging the spectator to strive to comprehend the ungivenness of nature as well as human nature.

Images of Light were photographed during twilight hours or at night. Thus, in these images light exists but has no direct affinity to luminescence. The result is that figures occupy an urban landscape from which they are alienated. Laor uses her digital video camera to take stills, but is also deeply influenced by the continuous cinematic creation, filming short video clips from which she isolates individual frames. Both these technological processes allow her to create new dismantled works. The figures stand out clearly in the twilight from background where patches of light are cut through by dark shadows combined with intense color, creating an expressive atmosphere, principally stemming from dramatic backgrounds that provide fantastic scenery. Laor chooses to show the urban public park as no-place and the figures as anonymous. In situations where Laor "cuts" images from reality (she never stages them), the "picture" is built up or alternatively fades away. She creates an intensified object, boundless and timeless. Uncanny colors formulate a new unfamiliar setting where human figures seem to grow from within. As a result, the backgrounds seem chaotic, emphasizing the frail human condition and arousing primal inherent concepts and feelings of anxiety and death.

While photographing, Laor has tried to free herself from conscious thought and work intuitively. In this way she attempts to reach the irrational which is portrayed in the powerful and boundless landscape. In Image of Light #3 two people walk through the wilderness. Laor portrays her constant vision of isolated images wandering continuously in the wilderness. A mental picture which might be rooted in the fact that she is a second generation Holocaust survivor – her uncle was shot while walking and her mother roamed the streets. The frailty and loneliness of their lives is a central source of inspiration in her work.

The single lone image is portrayed throughout her work. In Image of Light #12 , a sole black silhouette of a woman is placed against a red-hued backdrop of emptiness. Laor develops the ideas of awe-inspiring nature, death, the sublime, and life's inescapable emptiness. The border where matter ends is emphasized. Like Ingmar Bergman's Totentanz – The Dance of Death (in The Seventh Seal ), Laor sets her figure on the border line between heaven and earth, emphasizing humanity's fragility and delicate temporality. This intensification of expression characterizes the Northern Romantic tradition. Casper David Friedrich attempted to revitalize the divine experience in a personal, secular world. The spiritual was displaced from traditional religious images to nature. Goethe stressed that infinite substance exists in man and in nature. Laor is concerned with this same idea. Although the woman in the photograph is frail, she is situated in the central axis of the composition manifesting, as in Freidrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), the classical idea of a human being as a microcosm striving for knowledge. Gerhard Richter in his painting of the sea ( Untitled , 1973) evolves this thought while completely removing the human figure, placing the viewer at the edge. In contrast, Laor's figure is prominent but the landscape is unfathomable, it is a great abiding object. The role of the image as silhouette is to make peace with the abstract landscape. It is the dissolution of the image but it subsists despite its dissolution. The recognizable figure humanizes the amorphic void – the landscape. The photograph is seen as hallucination, a daydream or a fantasy where the image signifies the real, the connection to our objective world and as long as it exists we will not fall into emptiness. Laor says: "the main concept is inaccessibility, the un-limited we cannot get rid of but we can also not find, and this is exactly why it cannot be avoided".

In Images of Light Laor makes an interesting move by replacing the untamed and grand nature found in Romanticism for a municipal urban park charged with expressionism. She chooses to blur the categories ascribed to the external sublime and internal desire and anxiety. In unifying man and nature, she reflects the human condition as transience.

Laor's painterly way of thinking and striving towards emptiness is further stressed in her words: "A perfect photograph will be white upon white, the perfect balance which can be obtained by nothingness. If you take a scale, it is perfectly balanced only when it carries nothing." However, Laor is trying to reach the perfect void by material means which she chooses to dismantle to a point where the fleshiness of the print is exposed. Thus the print becomes a Memento Mori in photographs showing decaying red fruit with a fish or single enlarged images with sfumato contours situated in banal interiors. "The monotonous infinite dismantling is acted upon in order to erase the living truth which is unique and in order to transfer it to the neutral totality of death."

<<< Back