Dr. Aya Lurie, Chief Curator, The Shpilman Institute for Photography The text is taken from the exhibition Linguistic Turn, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, April 25 – July 31, 2013. Edited by Hemda Rosenbaum. Translated by Alma Mikulinski In her new exhibition, Ilit Azoulay presents five large-scale photographs that produce a creative and exciting viewing experience culminating in Red (2013) and Panic in Lack of an Event (2013). While her previous photographic projects – Room # 8 (2011) or The Keys (2010) – were characterized by a detailed and meticulous organization of objects on a white background, the new works spiral [...]

The interview was first published in A Photo Editor. For Jonathan Blaustein’s website click here. Roger Ballen is among the most talented and successful photographic artists in the world today. He was kind enough to agree to an extensive interview last month, and is also allowing us to publish images from two forthcoming books. JB: Why did you choose to move to South Africa from the United States? RB: When I was a young man in my early twenties, in 1973, it was a time of cultural revolution. I guess I was swept up with that. I graduated from University of [...]

By Dr. Aya Lurie A work by artist Jan Tichy that he created for the exhibition LUMA will be featured in the exhibition La Città Nuova. 1 Beyond Sant’Elia. One Hundred Years of Urban Visions, which will be on view in Villa Olmo, Como (Italy). Dr. Aya Lurie, the chief curator of The Shpilman Institute for Photography, was invited to contribute a text to the exhibition catalog: The four cycles of images that make-up Jan Tichy’s new video installation, “Things to Come, 1936–2012″, are hypnotically captivating (fig. 1). Screened in looped successions in three projectors, the cycles are constantly evolving, merging and interchanging. Every [...]

Read More from Peter Nitsch in The SIP Blog right here and visit his website  Back in the days of analog photography the term “instant” meant to get a photo within a few minutes. That waiting time got way shortened by digital photography and gadgets like mobile phones and digital cameras. Nowadays digital photography is instant photography. Even if the digital photo can be saved, uploaded and published within a glance, does a real picture truly exist? Picture in a sense of “always in mind” for the case this photo gets lost for some reason. Today pictures are deleted without much [...]

By Nathan Jurgenson Nathan Jurgenson is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is also on the planning committee of Theorizing the Web, organized by the University of Maryland at CUNY, March 1&2, 2013. Follow the events on Twitter. This post originally appeared on The New Inquiry. Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson, tumblr  or log on to his website. All images are Courtesy of Nathan Jurgenson The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat. It is a nostalgic time [...]

By Jonathan Morse This text was originally published in the blog The Art Part Photo by Jonathan Morse All images are courtesy of the writer In Arthur Hopkins’s magazine illustration of a night scene from The Return of the Native, the corpse of Eustacia Vye is borne up into lantern-light by Diggory Venn’s shadowed body. Source: The Victorian Web Hardy’s way of communicating the death was to represent a flesh that can be known now only  by touch and inference. Covered by her drapery, Eustacia is no longer decently to be seen. In Hardy’s sentence, the dread of death is the [...]

As a photographer and movement artist, my work presents a dialogue between motion, time and space. Photography is a tool I use to convey the suspense and intimacy between these themes, to draw one closer to the essence of my subjects, and to reveal what our eyes cannot capture. Over the years I have have explored urban landscapes with bicycles, buses and people in motion and also ten meter murals of martial artists and dancers. Ten years ago I devised a novel method of pulling film  through a stills camera to create panoramic photographs that depicts a narrative of motion [...]

By Nili Goren, Tel Aviv Museum The text first appeared in the framework of the exhibition, currently on view in Tel Aviv Museum as part of Shaham’s win of the Constantiner Award for Photography 2012. Shahm received the Shpilman grant for Israeli Photography Students 2011.  Assaf Shaham uses new ways to convene old souls to discuss mythological issues that have fascinated visual culture even before it was assigned theories. With calculated lightness, Shaham travels the tracks of discourse in parallel, opposing and circular directions. He creates poetic images while provoking the artificial intelligence of sophisticated mechanisms, disrupts the operating instructions [...]

By Efrat Shir The text first appeared as part of the exhibition Hippocampus, Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv. Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveler find In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave, Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place, Convincing as those that children find in stones and holes? No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive. His journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness. On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not buffer: He condones his fever; he is weaker than [...]

Yanai Toister’s exhibition Blueprint, which is currently on view at the Tel-Hai Open Museum of Photography (Curator: Naama Haikin), includes a selection of 80 works from the last decade, as well as a new series created for the exhibition: Untitled (Fuji 2012). In this series, Toister scanned apples that he had brought from Australia with a three-dimensional scanner. As the apples emerge from darkness and hover between abstraction and tangibility we are presented with what seems like photograms on the apples themselves. Like other series that he has shown in recent years, such as Keepers of Light or 9-Sheet Experiment, [...]

By Ayelet Shahar Ha’Cohen Nir Dvorai examines himself, his body, his close surroundings and the artistic language he develops. As he examines traditional darkroom work processes, which mainly include photographs without a camera and night shots of forgotten objects that he isolates by using a flash, he in fact chooses to work under cover of darkness. Nir Dvorai, Untitled, 103*123 All Images are Courtesy of the Artist In his work process, Nir turns his body into light-sensitive material. He smears his body with developing chemicals and imprints himself on photo paper that was previously exposed to light. The photo paper, [...]

By Adam Abulafia Adam Abulafia will take part in the gallery talk with David Claerbout, hosted by The SIP and Tel Aviv Museum, on December 3. More details can be found here. This text was first published in the online magazine Ma’arav, August 2009. Film historians usually map the documentary film along two modern tendencies which began to develop in the late 1950’s. One tendency, referred to as “observational”, is attributed to the American genre of Direct Cinema, whose creators included directors like Robert Drew, the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman; the other tendency, referred to as “participatory”, is attributed to [...]

In october, The Shpilman Institute for Photography introduced a professional curating workshop, devoted to photography. This was a first encounter, following a professional visit to London, in collaboration with Outset and The British Council during November 2011. Alongside Israeli curators, among them Ruti Direktor, Naomi Aviv, Roey Brand, Rafael Zaguri Orly and more, the workshop also had the pleasure to host  renowned curators Ann Tucker and Prof. Bodo von Dewitz. Shalom Shpilman, founder and chairman of The SIP, and Dr. Aya Lurie, chief curator, also took part. Now, you can watch the workshop and presentations made by the curators right [...]

By Orit Bulgaro LUMA  turns the spotlight on New Vision as a unique phenomenon in the history of modern avant-garde photography, which emerged simultaneously in various centers throughout Europe, and later in the United States as well. The exhibition is on view in our exhibition space, 27 Shoken st., Tel Aviv (closing: October 27, 2012). Here’s a taste from the exhibited works and the catalogue: Nathan Lerner’s Eggs and Box (1938) was created while the artist engaged in an investigation of light in abstract photography, characterizing the medium’s properties and qualities (In 1941 he co–curated the exhibition “The Creative Use of [...]

By Rotem Rozental Martin Brink is an artist and photographer based in Sweden. Apart from his various ongoing projects, he is also the founder and editor of the blog The Digital Photobook,  which, as the name suggests, focuses on current ventures revolving around photobook practices. In a recent blogpost, titled “Shameless self-promotion – my PDF books,” Brink shared some of his own digital endeavors. “In 2011 I created the first PDF book called “Garden”. It was a small series and a PDF was a playful way of presenting them.” However, he says, they soon became a mean to shape a visual [...]

In September 12, 2012, The SIP hosted the symposium Sound and (New) Vision, following our current exhibition LUMA – Modern Photography in the First Half of the 20th Century. Click here to read more about the exhibition. After a visit in he exhibition and opening words by Shalom Shpilman, founder and chairman of The SIP, and Dr. Aya Lurie, chief curator, we were proud to introduce Prof. Olivier Lugon  from the University Of Lausanne, who presented the lecture “Laslo Moholy-Nagy and the New Vision.” Now, you can join us and watch his presentation right here:

By Rotem Rozental Yes, it’s that wonderful time again, in which we dip into the impressive digital archives of Flak Photo Collection, initiated, curated and updated five times a week by Andy Adams, at FlakPhoto.com. This time, the excursion led the eye to photographers who also engage in relationships and emotions, whether through documentation, societal critic or personal commentary: Mustafah Abdulaziz USA v. Japan, Times Square, New York City, 2011, The Memory Loss series All Images are Courtesy of the Artists

By Shalom Shpilman The exhibition “What Really Went On” is dedicated to two works by Barbara Probst (born in Munich, 1964; lives and works in New York)—a contemporary conceptual artist, a pioneer in the field of photography, whose work is being exhibited in Israel for the first time by the Shpilman Institute for Photography. Both works demonstrate the complementary perspectives typical to Probst’s investigations, which essentially undermine accepted basic (technical and thematic) concepts of photography. Prevalent answers to questions of truth, documentation and fiction, the relationship between photography and reality, modes of seeing and perception, points of view and perspectives, [...]

By Orit Bulgaru, Curator At the center of Rami Maymon’s new video (2012) is a 1936 photograph of French artist Dora Maar, taken by Man Ray. Maymon photographed Man Ray’s portrait, printed in an art book, in one static shot, lighting the image with a lamp that scans it slowly from above. This is Maymon’s first video piece, which was actually filmed using a still camera that also enables filming video. This is a significant technical detail, because in the video, the light, the heart of still photography, is captured in motion. The work created by surrealist artist Man Ray [...]

By Jonathan Morse, The Art Part “When you had gone the love came. I supposed it would,” wrote Emily Dickinson to her friend Elizabeth Holland. And then she thought about sitting down to table with her love and added, “The supper of the heart is when the guest has gone” (letter 318). Dickinson often thought of love that way, as a communion with the sole self. Sometimes, in fact, the communicant even excluded those whom it was ostensibly inviting sub tectum. After Dickinson’s cousin Eudocia Flynt returned home from a visit with the Dickinsons, for instance, she was followed by a [...]