At the conclusion of the parcours through his exhibition The Romantic Trail and the Concrete House, Sharon Ya’ari hung a pair of pictures that already attract attention through the contrasting nature of their motifs. The north wall of the dining room at Haus Esters is dominated by a monumental black-and-white print measuring 111 x 137 centimeters. The nocturnal picture shows an asphalted parking lot that is partially covered with a heap of snow. A band of light glitters in the background from a small park lined with palm and others trees while the site itself is immersed in a bright light from an unseen source that modulates all the details. Despite the fact that the scene makes an eerily deserted impression, numerous footprints and the compact quality of the snow suggests that a large number of people have recently walked back and forth across the place. All the same, two small asphalt “peaks,” perhaps one or two meters tall, rise from the leveled heap with the result that the stage-like foreground seemingly presents the model of a snow-covered mountainous region.
The image’s panoramic character invites the viewer to carefully study it from a certain distance in keeping with its large format. Conversely, the viewer must come very close to the wall in order to be able to read the second image, a color print measuring only 26 x 37 centimeters. In doing so, Sharon Ya’ari arranged for a considerable time delay in the course of the reception of the pictures that simultaneously reflects a specific hierarchy: The stately, representative black-and-white image taken with a large format camera demands the viewer’s immediate attention while the second corresponding small format chromogenic photograph taken with a 35mm camera is seemingly of secondary importance. It shows a scenario populated by about forty children and several adults. Depicted against a backdrop showing a row of palm trees in radiant sunshine, we see the children frolicking around in the snow that only becomes visible in the bustle of bodies upon second glance. As such, the small colored snapshot placed by Ya’ari in a light brown wood frame annotates and explains the large format black-and-white print in a dark gray frame. Both images bear the same title: Snow Mountain (2 Trucks Full).
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ya’ari employs the mode of the black-and-white image in order to reference his motif’s historical context. The likewise large format photograph Beit Ha’am, Nahalal, East View, for example, was also made using a black-and-white glass plate “as this method corresponds to how photographs were made at the time this complex was built.” 1 The Beit Ha’am cultural center at Nahalal was namely planned by the architect Richard Kauffmann in keeping with the principles of the Bauhaus and opened in 1930.
From this historicizing perspective, the motif of Snow Mountains takes us even further back in the history of photography, namely to its beginnings when the exposure time was so long that photographers primarily took pictures of inanimate objects, motionless landscapes and even cityscapes that did not change over the course of several minutes. This is at least what the preserved pictures seem to show. It was in fact of no significance whether or not people could be found on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, which William Henry Fox Talbot photographed around 1843 for his book The Pencil of Nature. 2 Although the motif, as Talbot expressly states in his accompanying text, was photographed in the afternoon 3 and the Boulevard was surely full of passers-by, it is impossible to discerne one single person in the picture. This is because all photographic traces of the flâneur immediately dissolved and simply vanished from the image as soon as they moved. The extended shutter speed transformed people in photographs into spirits. The snapshot makes them visible again.
Ya’ari employs pairing as a means of overcoming an old paradox of photography that the Belgian art historian Thierry de Duve vividly illustrates through a juxtaposition of time exposure and the snapshot. “The snapshot is a theft,” Duve writes, “it steals life. Intended to signify natural movement, it only produces a petrified analogue of it.” 4 The snapshot “shows an unperformed movement that refers to an impossible posture. The paradox is that in reality the movement has indeed been performed, while in the image the posture is frozen.” 5 Time exposure, by contrast, denies the processuality of life itself, creating “landmarks of the past.” Life exists nowhere else than on the surface of the photographs. De Duve speaks of an “absolute zero,” which represents time exposure. 6
Of particular interest for the presentation of the two pictures making up Sharon Ya’ari’s Snow Mountains is de Duve’s description of photography’s two modes of perception, namely the “picture-like” quality of time exposure and the “event-like” quality of the instantaneous photograph as “mutually exclusive.” 7 While a snapshot can be read pictorially and a time exposure under the aspect of the frozen moment, it always involves an either/or situation that cannot lead to a synthesis on account of asynchronicity. De Duve calls this an “unresolved oscillation of our psychological responses towards the photograph.” 8
Ya’ari, by contrast, forcefully addresses this fluctuation by staging a hierarchy that evokes its own temporality. The reception of the two pictures has to take place from their respecting distances – the large format picture from a greater distance than the small format photograph that must be observed from close up – and yet both can only be viewed together as an inextricable pair: With this evacuation of the relocation of the paradox to a motion of time, Ya’ari dissolves the old contradiction of photography.
It seems almost ironic in this context that the snow was in the process of rapidly melting when the time exposure photograph was made. In order to provide local children with the unique opportunity to experience this surreal situation and frolic about in the snow with all its white splendor, two trucks transported it in the morning from Mount Hermon in the north of Israel to Holon, a city to the south of Tel Aviv. Now, at night, when the temperature never drops below freezing even in December, the snow also disappeared after the children in less than 24 hours. As such, it only temporarily represents the invariability of the landscape to the extent that it equally points to the eventfulness of the melting. The blanket of snow that has frozen into ice simultaneously symbolizes the freezing of time in the photograph itself – especially in the snapshot.
Snow is just as alien to Holon as are the succulents evident in the photograph Arad, Color Index that hangs in a group of eight pictures on the eastern wall of the dining room in Haus Esters. Surrounded by wriggling black water hoses, a yucca palm and an agave rise in the foreground of the picture. Their leaf rosettes have the same colors as the two hand towels drying on a clothesline on the lower floor of a modernistic apartment building. The second part of the work’s title, Color Index, names this referential character within the picture. In doing so, Ya’ari also alludes to photography’s indexical character as an imaging practice. Walter Benjamin already observed that Eugène Atget photographed deserted Parisian streets “like scenes of crimes. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.” 9 De Duve expresses this even more clearly when he notes that “the photograph is the result of an indexical transfer, a graft off of natural space.” The photograph transects the world at the focal point (of the lens) in order to show “when we point with the index finger at an object.” 10
In the end, Ya’ari’s indication of the index as an ordering force also invokes the strong referential character of color, form, motifs and meanings within his own oeuvre. It is not by chance that the picture of the snow transported from Mount Hermon to the southwest of the country hangs near the two succulents. The yucca palm and the agave were originally native to Central America and northern South America. They were naturalized by settlers to Palestine because they were able to defy the desert climate. When the viewers turn their attention again from the migrated plants to the freighted snow and finally to the playing children, they inevitably have to ask themselves where the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of these children were born. Behind each of the laughing faces is a short migration history that extends back only a few generations. It is entanglements and cross-references such as these that pervade the exhibition which makes the show’s true theme evident, namely the migration of people, of things and of forms.
This is made quite clear at the start of the exhibition when the viewer is welcomed in the so-called hall of Haus Esters with the picture Beit Ha’am, Nahalal, East View. Like all the works making up The Romantic Trail and the Concrete House, this motif was photographed especially for the exhibition in 2019. Ya’ari’s picture of the community center at Nahalal was taken to show it as a sibling of Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Esters in Krefeld. Both buildings were occupied or opened, respectively, in 1930, perhaps even in the same month and both houses were abandoned by their occupants or users. However, while Haus Esters is now open to the public as a museum and celebrated as a “temple of Modernism,” 11 Beit Ha’am already served as a military weapons factory in the nineteen-forties and has been deserted for over thirty years. Despite this, it represents an extraordinary example of the International Style in Israeli architecture. It was built by the architect and settlement planer Richard Kauffmann. Born in Frankfurt am Main in 1887, he migrated to Palestine with the establishment of Mandatory Palestine under British rule in 1920. 12 He planned a total of 644 projects, about 400 of which were realized, including the Nahalal moshav, a well known cooperative agricultural community. He was furthermore one of the architects of the White City in Tel Aviv. The White City refers to an ensemble of circa 4,000 buildings erected in the nineteen thirties and forties by immigrant Jewish architects that for the most part studied at the Bauhaus or were obliged to New Objectivity architecture. The international 13 migration of people was immediately followed by the international migration of forms.
The architectural language of the International Style was not simply copied in Israel but adapted to suit the country’s climatic as well as political conditions. The cultural center at Nahalal could, for example, be used as a shelter, a type of building that is eminently present in settlements and stylistically quite suitable to Modernism’s cubist forms. In the foreground of the photograph Beit She’an, the viewer recognizes a massive, curiously stepped and beveled concrete wall. It marks a bunker complex that in the event of a missile attack offered protection to the residents of the block of houses in the background. Experienced art lovers might also recognize the stylistic vocabulary of minimalist sculpture in these forms. It is consistent with this notion that the palm in the middle ground was destroyed by the weevils that infiltrated the Mediterranean region from Indonesia by way of the Arab countries, leaving a trail of devastation in its path. In order to halt its spread, the crowns of the infected trees have been sawn off. Solely the trunk remains standing as a thin soaring cylinder that completes the stereometric minimalist vocabulary of the pictorial language alongside hemisphere and cube.
Kauffmann’s building at Nahalal makes a dilapidated impression. Ya’ari, however, did not photograph it for the purpose of criticizing its present day condition but because he was fascinated by the beauty of the large parasols and the traces left behind by the anthroposophic kindergarten bordering the complex. 14 The playground equipment on the right edge of the picture immediately catches the eye while the small emblematic circles on the lower left edge can only be slowly deciphered. It concerns concentrically arranged flowers, blossoms, cones and leaves that create a fragile image which will be rapidly blown away by the next gust of wind. It appears as if the children had interrupted their work at dusk and could continue with it at any time.
Ya’ari dedicated a separate small format color photograph to the sunshades: Parasols, Nahalal, West View. Here again, the large format black-and-white picture and the chromogrenic snapshot supplement each other to create a mutually annotating pair of images. The snapshot seems to be a little “trashy” (Ya’ari), as if it was taken by an amateur. Backlight emanating from the low sun overflows the whole picture and even finds a medium in the metallic foot it causes to garishly glitter for the second time. The motif of the twofold light source is already evident in the large black-and-white print of Beit Ha’am, Nahalal, East View. In this picture, it is the two spotlights placed only a few meters from each other on the roof of the center that prevents one from characterizing this photograph taken professionally with a plate camera as flawless. It seems unlikely that Sharon Ya’ari made the same photographic “mistake” in a pair of pictures twice in succession and must therefore concern an intentional solution.
Both the white of the snow in the Holon pictures as well as the all-outshining light in the Nahalal photographs reveals the pure unexposed photographic paper. While a photo negative becomes all the more darker where the light is particularly intense while taking the photograph, the black on the negative hinders the exposure of the photographic paper in the next step during the enlargement process. Both motifs again make us aware of the fact that Sharon Ya’ari is one of the few active photographers who only rarely works digitally but above all with traditional film material. 15
The artist scans the developed negatives, processes the data and enlarges the completed image files mostly as C-Prints or as pigment prints on archival paper. Errors frequently occur during the scanning process, for example the two traces of light on the pair of images making up Run, which hangs on the main wall of the hall at Haus Esters to the right of the Nahalal photographs. Both pictures show a runner dressed in sportswear. Shown under a threatening stormy sky, he is seen running past a fenced-in parking space across a street, or rather, through a dismal landscape comprising blocks of apartments. The unusually coarse grain of the print indicates the type of material that was used, namely a high speed 35mm black-and-white film. A curved trace of light that is in turn dotted breaks from the grain. It begins at the center left edge of the first picture and loses itself at the bottom right edge of the second picture. It likewise references a technical aspect of the photographic process; the two motifs on the roll film were in fact obviously photographed one after the other because the trace jumps at the same height of the picture from one motif to the other.
This trace of light that falls in curves triggers an impulse of motions that is transferred to the entire wall. With his hanging, Ya’ari took up and duplicated the course of the line. It gives the pictures a direction from left to right, its exigency less determined by the Latin reading direction – especially as Hebrew is written from right to left – but rather by the pull of the downward falling trace. This impulse is heightened even further by the electric tension of the atmosphere and the apparent urgency to seek shelter from the approaching storm.
As the preliminary end point of a controlled motion, the fifth motif that completes the row on the main wall has a special significance. Sharon Ya’ari decided to recall a large urban planning utopia at this point with his picture Arad, Avishur Neighborhood 1969. The viewers are presented with the image of a courtyard that has been paved with square concrete slabs from which a loose arrangement of blocks rise in different heights, offering a place to sit to both adults and children. All the measurements derive from the size of the concrete slabs. Several of the blocks are cubical, others are half as high while a third group are twice as high as the cubes. It is a modular system that respects the differences between people while propagating a certain uniformity at the same time. In modern architecture, the notion of modularity represents a reduction of the construction costs that can then be invested in the quality of the dwellings and communal life. Its highpoint was during the nineteen sixties and seventies, but this social-reformist impulse was rejected early on by the building owners who were more interested in lowering costs rather than in taking the needs of the inhabitants into consideration. Utopia and dystopia shake hands in the realm of modular building.
The Avishur housing quarter photographed by Ya’ari was built exactly at that time. It is located in the center of the city of Arad, which was built in 1962 for ten to twenty-thousand residents in the middle of the desert about 25 kilometers west of the Dead Sea as Israel’s first planned city. On the one hand, the courtyard is reminiscent of a concrete locus amoenus. A transcendental light also breaks out into the scenario here like a friendly spirit as a result of a photographic error, recalling all the hopes once associated with modern architecture. Courtyards in particular were systematically constructed as protective barriers against the impositions of the desert climate while simultaneously enabling a vivid urban atmosphere. On the other hand, however, the sheer amount of concrete used here is overwhelming. A half-height concrete wall delineates the courtyard against the background from which a massive stilted apartment block rises. For Ya’ari, the colorless concrete slabs in Arad, Avishur Neighborhood 1969 are in a direct contrasting proportion to the warm colors of the upscale wood flooring laid by Mies van der Rohe in Haus Esters. 16 Both proceed from the block as the basic modular form. However, while Mies employed modularity as a rhetorical stylistic device and his primary aim was to meet the individual needs of his clients, the design at Arad was very concretely targeted at supporting a collective form of communal life.
The viewer realizes only upon second glance that the scenario makes a curiously tidy impression. Are the inhabitants still keeping up the premises with the same care as they probably did when the complex was new? Are the courtyards still local meeting places where neighbors who moved to Arad like to no other Israeli city from so many different places can become acquainted with each other? Is this strong utopian impulse, which Sharon Ya’ari staged in his the hanging of the pictures, still tangible today?
The answer might be disappointing at first: It was the artist himself who swept out the sand and bits of broken glass from courtyard. The difference is immediately evident when one focuses attention on a photograph with the same title (Arad, Avishur Neighborhood 1969). Although closely related in terms of motif, the artist deliberately hung this photograph in another room. In this photograph, dried grass is still growing from between the slabs, the edges of the seating cubes are partially chipped and the ground is covered with gravel. However, it is, of all things, the inconspicuous action of cleaning up, which can only be indirectly deduced through the absence of dust and dirt, alters the reading of all the pictures in the space. The start against the dangers of the approaching storm (Run) suddenly appears defiantly optimistic and the concentric circles of leaves and blossoms disseminated by the kindergarten children now have the potential to expand infinitely like rings on water (Beit Ha’am, Nahalal, East View). Even the hideous gigantic sculptures depicted in Transformers now possibly command a modicum of respect from the viewer because they report on the power and effort involved in treating incredibly heavy weights. The sculptures that have been encircled by a lovingly erected fence whose fragility stands in complete disproportion to the immense force of the sculptures likewise provide an account of a clumsy effort to positively shape the future.
The hanging on the main wall of the hall in Haus Esters gives the exhibition a direction that Mies van der Rohe’s open ground plan originally did not envision. It extends from the photographs of the cultural center at Nahalal past the two pictures of runners to the utopian courtyard at Arad. In terms of content and form, Sharon Ya’ari triggers a strong motion stimulus here that is intended to activate the viewer. Ya’ari generally photographs unremarkable scenes, typical average buildings that nonetheless represent the “viral DNA of modern architecture,” a public square, buildings and landscapes that are free of current conflicts. They are the “unconscious places” 17 where the indicators of a societal constitution are layered and – this is decisive – where the common future is negotiated. Seen from this perspective, the photographs making up The Romantic Trail and the Concrete House are resolutely political, by all means activist and at least guardedly optimistic.
1Sharon Ya’ari in conversation with the author on February 13, 2020.
2William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London, 1844), p. 17, plate II: VIEW OF THE BOULEVARDS AT PARIS.
3Ibid, p. 17.
4Thierry De Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” in October 5 (1978), pp. 113–125.
5Ibid., p. 114.
6Ibid., p. 116.
7Ibid., p. 113.
8Ibid.
9Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zorn (Schocken: New York, 1969), p. 226.
10De Duve (see note 4), pp. 118–119.
11Sharon Ya’ari (see note 1).
12On Richard Kauffmann, see Myra Warhaftig, Sie legten den Grundstein. Leben und Wirken deutschsprachiger jüdischer Architekten in Palästina 1918–1948 (Wasmuth: Berlin and Tübingen, 1996), pp. 42–49.
13Winfried Nerdinger, Das Bauhaus. Werkstatt der Moderne (Munich, 2018), pp. 117–119. The concept of the White City is critically examined by Sharon Rotbard, White City, Black City. Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa (Cambridge, 2015). Of special interest with a view to photography is the essay by Stefan Schweizer, “Die ‘White City’ von Tel Aviv und ihre architekturfotografische Inszenierung,” in Architektur Fotografie. Darstellung – Verwendung – Gestaltung, erschienen anlässlich der Tagung Architektur Fotografie. Fotografie als Darstellungs-, Entwurfs- und Gestaltungsmedium der Architektur im 20./21. Jahrhundert (Marburg 2011). Ed. by Hubert Locher and Rolf Sachsse (Berlin and Munich, 2016), pp. 230–244.
14Sharon Ya’ari (see note 1).
15“Sharon Ya’ari in Conversation with Vered Maimaon,” in exh. cat. Leap Toward Yourself, Tel Aviv Museum of Art 2013, pp. 227–235; here p. 227.
16Sharon Ya’ari (see note 1).
17Exh. cat. Thomas Struth. Unbewußte Ort/Unconscious Places, Kunsthalle Bern et al. 1987/88.
This text appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition The Romantic Trail and the Concrete House in Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Museum Haus Esters in 2020; and Kunstverein Heilbronn, in 2021.