Yoav Friedländer

Yoav Friedländer's grandfather, Kurt, fled Austria immediately to Israel after the Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night") and was a British Brigades soldier during WWII and later served in the Israeli Army. Yoav grew up in the valleys of the Judean Desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He is native to Israel but was uprooted from his past. After High School he joined the Israeli army for a mandatory service of 3 years. He started as a paratrooper, and became the fourth generation of army soldiers. Yoav received his B.A in Photography from Hadassah College Jerusalem (2011), and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts.

Artist Statement: A Form of View 

I grew up in the valleys of the Judean Desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. My work presents the chaotic perception of an “Americanized Israeli”; composed of mediated American culture, desert landscapes, and war, which became integral throughout my life. I mix scale models with straight photographs, both of Israel and the US, and form a conjunction between two different cultures and sets of geographical locations. The work is based on the recognition that our world is informed by images, as photographs represent and replace experiences & memories. 

Various aspects of our reality, are being described by photographs and have never been experienced by us in person. Photographs have set the expectations for things we might experience; at times we find ourselves considering what is real to be different from how it should be according to its own image.

Scale models I build accompany the landscapes I photograph. They are recreations of places I don’t have physical access to: memories, and images of places and spaces that I saw through photographs. I make them, and photograph them with the intent that they will echo the realism of the original and bare the illusion of the photograph. The models act much like photographs, they share an indexical relation to the original. Images refer to the reality they record and my models refer to the images that represent reality. Both enable external observation of a reality’s-proxy.

  I am relying on preexisting images when photographing the landscape, as I am aware that I cannot reverse the influence of those images on my vision of the landscape. I found myself photographing the landscapes of both Israel and the U.S. from the same stand point: at the margins of the road. While in Israel I have adapted to the war torn restricted access to the land, in the U.S. I am bound to the same position only due to the privatization of the land as property.

Perhaps we’ve changed places and now we look at our world through the perspective of the camera. Maybe we haven’t just mixed the original and the copy, perhaps we’ve swapped between them. It seems that ever since the invention of the photograph, reality has become augmented by its own image.

Ayala Gazit

Ayala Gazit was born in Haifa, Israel in 1984, and was raised in Tel Aviv by an American mother and an Israeli father. She started photographing at age 15, and quickly fell in love with photography as an art form as well as a language. When she was 18 year old she was drafted to the Israeli Army, where she served for two years as a military photographer in a highly classified unit in the Intelligence division. In 2005 she moved to New York to complete a BFA in photography at The School of Visual Arts. Ayala graduated with Honors in May 2009, and was fortunate enough to be chosen as the single student to receive the Tierney Fellowship. Thanks to the Fellowship's support she managed to begin the project, “Was it a Dream",which she has been wishing to embark on for over a decade. This summer she will begin her MFA studies in the International Low Residency MFA program in photography in The University of Hartford.

View more of Ayala's work here and here 

Was it a Dream Statement 

When I was 12 years old my father told me that I have an older brother named James, who lives in Australia. My father and James at the point have been sending each other letters for a number of years, however they have yet to meet or hear one another’s voice. Uncomfortable being the eldest grandchild on both sides of my family, I became obsessed with the possibility of an older brother. I never had the chance to meet James, he committed suicide in October 1996. This work is my attempt to create a portrait of my brother whom I will never meet. When photographing the “Unphotographable”, by following the traces and echos of ones existence after his passing. Thanks to the Tierney Fellowship I received in 2009, I traveled across Australia to meet James's family, who thankfully accepted me as one of their own. The work I created consists of family snapshots, letters and quotes from conversations, alongside my own images taken in Israel and Australia.