Night Vision
Our collaboration began in 2017 in our second year at Shenkar. We’ve done several projects together. The connection between all our projects is the searching for the thing that has been pushed aside and forgotten. In our projects, we use film cameras in large format, which, due to their obsolescence, has been pushed aside too, as same as the photographed objects. But, we don’t see this obsolescence as a limitation, we respect it. This is not about being obsolete or insisting on staying behind. The technical complexity and the time we invest in the process of creating the desired frame (due to the choice in film cameras) do slow down our work pace but this is an advantage for us: our prolonged stay at the shooting site with the object gives us a different and new perspective.
On the current project, all the photographed objects are machines: mechanical moving tools that have been found forsaken and abandoned. They stopped functioning a long time ago. The rust marks and nature which grew into them are an integral part of them. The objects were photographed late at night, using long exposures (the shooting time of a single frame lasts between 15-40 minutes), to detach them from the time and place. They are no longer the same rusty machines. Our photograph technique turns them into living monuments. The objects were found in complete darkness and lightened by us in continuous motion throughout the exposure time, which means we are literally inside the frame at the time of its creation. One of the most integral values in our project is the time: the time that disassembled the machines and changed their original shape and function, the time it takes to photograph the frame and the light marks the time left upon them.
The large-format cameras enabled us to print the photographs in large size. Thanks to the large prints we are able to create a space with living machines and not a space with photographs of machines. The machines predominate the space: in all the photographs, the machines look at the viewer and surround him. Although the machines were photographed in several locations all over the country (Israel), the darkness that surrounds them connects them to the same imaginary and detached dimension - they are all together now.
