Opening an email message, I find a photo – a completely helpless self-portrait, sincerely looking directly at the camera. This is my father, and this is the way he takes pictures – simple, but precise and profound, without twists, without giving up anything to himself or to the viewer. When he shoots people or objects, his eyes are full of kindness to others. Less to himself. “Have you seen this cripple?” – he asked me over the phone, explaining that he wanted to take a picture of himself in profile so that the arm and the leg look like stumps, but could not get a fairly accurate position when the camera shutter triggered.
My father knows how to take pictures, but he cannot talk about what he made. “It’s just, well …” – he says impatiently. “I came, I was looking for people that were there, I found this and took pictures…” – this is his story about an abandoned marble factory, where people from Bolivia, Romania, Ukraine and China have worked. Four friends from the Jerusalem camera club found the plant and stepped into it with their cameras and with their own eyes. Father was interested in people who worked there, and he was looking for things that can tell their stories. Protective plastic glasses, a can of hummus, a notebook filled with punctual rows of Chinese hieroglyph characters, and a blue work clothes on hangers – from all of this he builds new stories and frames them in a photograph. One after another.
People and their stories, hopes and everyday life – all freezes in these photographs as people in the ashes of Pompeii.
In my opinion – he is an artist of Buber’s dialogue “I – YOU” in a deep sense.
And when he takes photos of dumb things, he talks to them, and they answer him. It is impossible to look at his works without longing for getting into them, touching them, being there and joining the conversation. When he takes shoots of people or women, he is always able to see something that others cannot notice. Along the lines of a face in a picture he grabs hidden dreams, little sad scars, or a smiling thought that flashed just about in his head.
One can write stories about his photographs – but he will not. He has taken a photograph – and so has told … There’s nothing more to tell.