Gideon Gechtman at the exhibition “Artists-Curator: Assaf Shaham” at the International Photography Festival.
Opening: Saturday 05.04.2014 at 20:30
Gideon Gechtman, Obituary, 1984, silk print, 56X77 cm
Uri Gershuni curator of the exhibition “Horror Movie” at the International Photography Festival.
Opening: Saturday 05.04.2014 at 20:30
Unknown artist, from Uri Gershuni’s private collection
Unknown artist, from Uri Gershuni’s private collection
Unknown artist, from Uri Gershuni’s private collection
Unknown artist, from Uri Gershuni’s private collection
Horror Movie | Uri Gershuni
Fear is quite often paralyzing. In the exhibition “Horror Movie” fear is motivating. Analog photography, which has already been labeled as the “old” one, is bound to immense obscurity, to abeyance, to gaps. Those intervals, offering a vast space to imagination, are penetrated by fear. Evaporating in the digital photography, this feeling of inherent horror, that same fear of the unseen unraveling into the seen saturates the analog photography. The awe stricken photographer gently walks the fine line between reality and fiction above the abyss, wide open underneath.
At the hub of the exhibition is cruising the “the ship of fools” bearing a collection of “crippled” photography which is the result of the materialized fear. Containing flaws and disruptions, all the shots disobey both written and unwritten rules of “correct photography”. The photographers who created them immortalized what they didn’t want to witness. Such disruptions create a disturbing deviation, violating our ways of comprehending reality around us: day turns into night, human beings alter into animals, body becomes spirit, the dead resurrect. A book of rules is standing in front of the photographer’s eyes with its commandments of “do’s” and “don’ts”, like the biblical pillar of fire, guiding the people to safe encampment. The lines emerging in between the pages urge: ”Always place the subject of your photography in the middle”, “keep your fingers away from the lens”, “place the subject so the source of light is behind yourself and not the subject”.
One who does not follow the warning signs puts himself at risk. Driving by night, or with eyes shut is a double risk. Analog photography equals to driving through the darkness, the eyes are the lanterns trying to enlighten the dim road paved on the film of the murky camera.
By night, one must be twice aware, keeping his eyes wide open and holding the wheel firmly. One must prevent the machine from deviating, pulling him down the abyss.
Dalia Amotz, Deganit Berest, Noa Sadka, Simcha Shirman, and Ronit Shani have already been to the depths of the abyss. They still remember the sound of thump and the friction of the body. Their photographs preserve echoes of the traumatic encounter between body and machine, the meeting between organic and mechanical.
J.G Ballard’s novel “Crash” is a story about symphorophilia. The narrator’s passion is driven by his traumatized past when he was involved in a car crash. Likewise, the photographers in the exhibition experience intimate proximity to danger. They look fear right in the eye.
