A Star is Born, 2003

Uri Gershuni’s series of photographs was taken during 2004 in the auditions for the television show ‘A star is born 2’ (Israeli Idol). Gershuni attended the auditions held in various places throughout the country by geographic division: north center and south. In each location he photographed the candidates before entering the audition, scared and excited on the one hand, conscious of the new arena ahead of them and anxious to ‘play the game’, on the other.
All the figures are photographed against an identical backdrop, in a similar photographic format, thus enabling their body language, fashion and styling choices, and the array of ‘stardom’ insights that they have formed, to unfold across the forefront of the photographic frame, guiding the viewer through it.
The figures appearing in Gershuni’s photographs are entirely anonymous. They are depicted due to their very yearning to deliver themselves from the ‘periphery’ and be accepted into the cultural and economic ‘center’ (or what they perceive as a center).
‘A star is born’ is the type of show that enables anonymous figures, devoid of professional training or proven prior experience, to try their luck in this or that field on which the specific program focuses )singing, dance, fashion, etc.). such program thus spawn new ‘stars’ who thereby circumvent the need for years of hard work, in term of their art as well as the accumalation of contacts, publicity and exposure.
Being set as part of the series, the figures in Gershuni’s photographs present a wide cross-section emphasizing the inability to extract some common denominator, whether conscious, cultural or economic, with regard to them; thus, each figure remains a whole world in its own right and a refined essence of yearning for exposure at once.