Sharon Ya’ari: A Jigsaw Puzzle of Nothingness

“Boring” Photographs with a Little Story

The two series of photographs in Sharon Ya’ari’s current project, 5OO m Radius (in the catalogue) and Hope for Long Distance Photography (in the exhibition) ­appear, within the entire body of his photographic work, as veering off the main road; as an alternative move, an attempt to examine and rethink the medium, its material and technological possibilities, its historical and aesthetic contexts, while preserving its essential character.

The series 5OO m Radius  was photographed digitally, but printed as if it were not, whereas Hope for Long Distance Photography was taken on film, but printed digitally (all of Ya’ari’s previous series were shot on film in large format, and then digitally processed and printed). Through these experiments in the medium and in the photograph’s appearance, and through the black­-and-white coloration and the emphasis on simplified, minor thematic concerns, devoid of both human presence and occurrences, Ya’ari shifts his photography away from the course of the grand, spectacular, artistic/commercial, color “photography after photography,” harking back to distant histories, more attentive to the medium. The aesthetics of classical black-and-white photography that produced sublime landscapes is employed here, in its inarticulate, weakened, “mutilated” version, as a tool for the extraction of beauty from the minor loci and objects in which the Tel Aviv Bauhaus is revealed and to which it has deteriorated. 

In these series the photographer has moved to another house, as it were. He has taken his family and his belongings-the contents, the emotional world-and moved them elsewhere. 

Bauhaus with Two Cats

The photographer lives in central Tel Aviv: home, family, child. Albeit unseen in the photographs, they form the center of the circle, the axis around which the photographic act transpires-within a 5OO-meter radius from home. The photographs are multiple, and may multiply further. Ya’ari photographs derelict yards with neglected vegetation, discarded materials and objects, hidden corners, paths between houses, and “Bauhaus” traces: it is the architectural label, ascribed as a cultural­conceptual skeleton to the houses’ rundown appearance, whose pathos the photographs dismantle. The facades and the pavements leading up to the houses likewise appear peripheral, postern, and are photographed looking downward. The architecture, the inanimate objects and the flora are fused by the photograph into one unit, a sculptural configuration, a kind of assemblage that also functions as a “micro-archaeology”: fascination with the way in which things are cumulated and heaped in the city, like the strata of an archaeological site.

Territorial Photography

Two cats crouching on a block fence are seen at the edge of the photograph. Their gaze surrenders the photographer’s location, the invader’s presence in the backyard. The photographer’s physical presence in the courtyards-like the penetration into the apartments by means of a telescopic lens in the series Hope for Long ­Distance Photography-is a crossing of the boundary between the private and the public, a violation of privacy-photographic conduct not to be abided. 

It is indeed a futile glimpse, for ultimately both series depict places of nothingness: what the telescope sees through the window is a bowl of fruit … “Boring photographs with a little story,” says Ya’ari; the poetic dimension stems from the suspension of the gaze, from the little story that our consciousness fabricates from the random reality. Here too the traces of that voyeurism in the telescopic gaze or in the back window preserve the sense of foreboding on which Ya’ari insists in his photographic work. In the present series the photographic act outlines boundaries, territories, via the tools of surveillance: the long-range telescopic camera and the close-range camera that maps the artist’s immediate environs.