This is photography / Solo exhibition, Omer Tiroche Gallery, Jaffa, Israel, 2017

Curator: Reuven Kuperman

Shiran Yitzhari’s solo exhibition deals directly with the material and processes that are in the core of photography. Paper, emulsion, light, gaze, perpetuation, are all materials at her disposal. The exhibition researches themes such as truth, objectivity, and representation, the relationship between a reference, an image, and the significant moment of taking a photo. 

In her works, the connection between the world and the act of photography is continuous, even in comparison to analog photography. The contact between the paper and the emulsion creates the image, almost in a violent way.  She bypasses the camera, by creating the images directly on the printing paper. While photography as a medium considers the camera as a tool that “takes” the image away from the world, Yitzhari uses it as raw material. 

While photography is an efficient medium for transformation from the three into two dimensions, Yitzhari’s work makes a naughty move. In the work “Picture in a studio”, she printed still nature in such bright colors it appears to be flat; on the other hand, in the title work “This is photography”, she created a cast of a book by the same name, and placed it as a main object in the gallery space. 

In the series of works “It means and ends”, Yitzhari uses chemical printing papers, scrubbing them using a different level of force. The images testify more of the material than their actual reference. It echoes tests from the 19th century when pioneering photographers tried to give a feeling of light in their photos, evoked by a chemical reaction.  In another series, “Sunrise, Sunset”, Yitzhari conducts performances which leave traces on the printing paper. She used black and white printing paper, and placed wax covered light bulbs on top of it, inside a dark room. The heat from the bulbs melted the wax and the light gradually left traces on the paper. In a mentioned above work, “Picture in a studio”, uses art history and refers to the works of Giorgio Morandi in a modernistic approach. She exposes the surface under the paper and shows details which only the medium of photography can create. 

Looking in her work, associates with time and environment. She works in the twilight zone between a concrete image and an abstract shape. She evokes questions of hierarchy in the presented image and the act that created it. Although her work transforms scars, pain, and violence, her playful experiments create a lyric and fragile result. 

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