January 2021

Sometimes I arise at the dead of night

And take the clocks and stop them every one-

And yet- to be afraid of it- what boots it?

For mindful of its creatures all, Heaven in its own wisdom has ordained it so.

(Sung by the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal)

Stopping the wood and metal clock is one way of dealing with time and change. But there is also pride and strength that come with the acceptance of the coming hours. I know my fruits will eventually dry out. But as the Marschallin is saying, only the mirror shows it to as. In me my veins are pumping, throbbing, expecting still. I know, I can feel how precious this time is. How short. So meaningless compared to history, compared to the memories of men I hold in me and study.

Yes, old age is looming, oblivion and ugly death as well. But I am full of fire.

July 2020

Thinking of the future these days brings up the kind of thoughts that make one feel at the center of the universe and incredibly small at the same time. We need to fight for ourselves to make sure we don't go under too quickly on one hand, but we can't ignore the shifts all humanity is going through on the other. We actually have to take them into account if we plan on staying around and so we're more consciously bound to the state of the world. It's now more apparent that all of us make up one huge machine. An ever evolving, colossal machine. We're part of it, we move it, we break it, we rebuild it, and it's doing the same to us.

The idea for this series was born one evening at my dad's place, while discussing big questions and looking at the big buildings outside his window. It was one of those nights that make you feel you're at the edge of time, that you're living history. It made me think of the photos from the 1920s and '30s, showing skyscrapers going up in America's big cities and the huge industrial constructions erected all over the country, an era of huge transformation. Many of these photos were made special by the presence of human beings in them. Be it construction workers taking seemingly huge risks while eating a sandwich or a small factory worker made even smaller by standing in the midst of enormous machinery. It feels as though the people in those photos were carving humanity's road into the future with their own hands, sometimes with contagious hopefulness, sometimes with unsettling premonition. You can see both sides (although sometimes only one) in photographs of Margarette Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Alma Lavenson, Sherril V. Schell and Borris Ignatowich to name a few.

I thought the idea of the human body's interlacement and conflict with the constructions around it would come across well by putting the athletes' skin against the glass. And upon going through more photos from the same '20s and '30s I stumbled upon the work of the amazing Imogen Cunningham. She's simply phenomenal. One photograph especially caught my eye, it showed a fragment of the female body, made into an assembly of geometric shapes by the composition and lighting. While being almost abstract, it's still a very touching and intimate photo.
I decided to merge those two ways of looking at surface and construction. One kind made of glass and steel, the other of skin, muscle and bone. Both connected by the invisible substance of calculation and imagination.

Unfortunately I can't share the photos which inspired me here since I don’t have the rights, but if you're interested go over to my pinterest board and check them out: https://pin.it/2XDhDLM

The two talented athletes are Harel Cenoura Kidron and Yoav Bolacha Kashtan.

POD n.7 (COVID days)

Long Exposure

I used to spend whole summers in my grandparents’ old house, reading book after book and exploring every corner of that fascinating place. The best area to explore was the attic. It was quiet and dark, every room had its distinct smell and everywhere you looked there were boxes full of old stuff to discover. Many of the objects you can see in this photo came from that house and the warm, woody feel is directly inspired by those rooms. The young soldier in the photo is actually my grandfather sometime around 1940. But the idea for this picture actually started elsewhere.

Although you can't really call it a still life, this photo was meant to be one. It all began with the objects you see in the background. I knew I wanted to make a photo inspired by memento mori paintings, but it was hard to find the right angle. Memento mori ("be mindful of death"), is a genre defined first and foremost by its message, speaking to the brevity of life and its pleasures. With its subgenre "vanitas" (vanities), this kind of paintings were mostly popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, specifically among painters of the low countries (although not exclusively). They often included a skull, a watch (or an hourglass) and flowers, all of which speak to our limited time on earth and the transient nature of life’s pleasures.
Another aesthetical influence for this photo came from the Netflix show Freud. It’s a part historical part fantasy show portraying Freud’s early years as a young doctor in Vienna and it showcases a period that I love- the turn of the twentieth century, a time of explosive creativity and research in European history (for good and bad). All that made me want to create a photo showcasing the power of the mind and imagination and to juxtapose it with the idea of ephemerality and death.

These ideas were then to be merged with the subject of the day- "long exposure".  I wanted to create an image that echoed with this little girl I was, head deep in her fantasy world. The initial though was to use long exposure to move the book up and down and create an illusion of the book rising up to her reading face, luring her in. Not surprisingly though, this effect was unattainable with the means I had (being alone and not ready to engineer a system to get the book pulled up without my hand or face moving). So instead of fighting my own movement, I decided to take advantage of it.

I used a ventilator to help the pages flip (BTW pages are the most flappable when the book is freshly opened, a book that stays open for too long loses this effect). And with time I came up with a choreography that would end up showing a woman reading, with two hands on the table and a face coming out of the book, all at once.
I had my shutter open for 5 seconds, starting with my face towards the book and one hand leaning on the table while the other was flipping the pages to get them going. Then I turned my face to the right, then to the left, and then put the other hand on the table to have a final image of both hands leaning on each side. Finally, I lent back just in time for the flash.

Lighting-wise I had a key light with a red gel, set on rear curtain sync. I wanted it to freeze whatever happened right before the shutter closed rather than when it opened so I’d get the red face as sharp as possible (I tried both ways- first curtain sync with a reverse choreography too, but it was clearly looking better with RCS). There was a background light coming from the “caravaggioesque” upper left corner and a fill light on the "reading face".

This fill light was not your traditional light… I was out of professional lights and had to use a reading lamp. To attenuate the intensity of that light and focus it on my face and the book alone I patched up this Pringles grid (notice I left plenty of space for the heat to be released).

While shooting I also had a blue plastic bag covering the holes to make the temperature somewhat colder…

The editing process was quite interesting, I sent it to a couple of friends to see what they would come up with. One of the edits they created brought out the warm and cold light temperatures in a way that balanced the photo really well. I went along with this idea when I did my own version.

The skeleton engraving belonged to my grandfather who was a doctor. It was part of a collection of plates engraved by Andreas Vesalius in the 16th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_humani_corporis_fabrica).

POD n. 6 (COVID days)

Egg

For me "egg" relates immediately to the female egg cell, released every month during ovulation, then either fertilized by male sperm or shed with the corpus luteum during menstruation. Looking at the moment of ovulation, caught in an amazing photo I found on google, I realized it was yellow. What did I have at home that could represent it?

I ended up opening my fridge and finding the lemons and apples I've been hording, and knew I had to use them. Being immersed in the study of Renaissance art in the last few days I immediately thought I might as well do something in the same vein, still-life.

Looking for inspiration online my eyes were caught by a beautiful painting of one of the greatest ever, Caravaggio.

View fullsize

Still Life with Fruit (1605-1610)

Looking around the kitchen I found all I needed, including (very old) beans, lentils, sweet potatoes and more. My first thought was to use popcorn as the sperm on its way to the egg, the proportions seemed not too ridiculous. But the moment I saw my overgrown garlic, with its polliwog shape, all scientific accuracy went out the window.

I studied Caravaggio's use of colour, and saw he used warm and saturated reds and yellows on the left, the middle section however was mostly green and yellow, and juxtaposed to the basket in the bottom right corner was a splash of unsaturated red. For the photo it was going to be the opposite, I was going to switch it and have yellow in place of red and red in place of green. Why was that?

In my opinion the left part of the painting, the big basket and the dates, were the subject of the photo, or rather, the point that first draws the viewer’s attention. It's clearly painted in a color that attracts the eye, red, and it’s saturated and bright. I think the fact that the watermelon on the right is not as saturated is another proof of the fact the painter meant our eye to go to the left first.* For this reason the fertilized egg should be placed in the same position, thus making me switch the colours to keep the same balance. I think it's very interesting to note that although the fruits on the left are the most eye catching, the light beam is actually falling away from them on the watermelons and these worm-looking green fruits. These are actually the brightest parts of the picture. Yet any photographer would be able to tell you they tend to put their subjects in the brightest part of the frame, as another way to draw the viewer's eye. Why is that then? One explanation I was given is that the real subject of the painting is the wealth and richness of the edible fruits. Abundance is the subject, and this is why the painter doesn't allow your eye to focus on one point only.

My photo on the other hand would have a clearer subject, and this is why I decided that although I was going to replicate the light scheme of the painting, I was going to use an aperture which would allow for a medium depth of field, making a subtle but noticeable difference between the lemons and the rest. The sperm cells by the way didn’t just hung there obediently. I had to chew some gum to make it stick (:

Next thing we should touch upon is the beam of light. Two things that might not seem problematic on first glance made me sweat.  First, as you can see, the beam is coming from the upper left part of the frame in direction of the bottom right corner. An interesting effect is going on there. The left side of the beam has a pretty soft transition from shadow to light- at least compared with the right side. But as could be expected, when I flashed my light, the left transition, where the wall was closer to the light was much sharper that the right transition. No matter what modification I used on my flash (different kinds of snoots in different angles) I couldn't get it. I also tried tilting surfaces in different angle in relation to the light (who said the wall behind Caravaggio's fruits was straight?) but I gave this up pretty quickly, it wasn't practical in this case since I didn’t have a good enough surface to put behind my vegetables instead of the wall. In the end the solution I found was to use a cutting board to make the right transition sharper.
A second problem remained. The beam in Caravaggio's painting is completely parallel. This is a weird physical effect, since light naturally spreads. I tried to look up the physical reasons for which light could fall in a parallel fashion, and found out about the collimated beam, in which light rays (or any other electromagnetic radiation), when travelling a very big distance become parallel. But this is not an effect we can witness naturally. It's true the light might be coming from the sun, but the actual source of light here would be the window, or the wall in the roof (legend has it that Caravaggio was thrown out of an apartment he was occupying for cutting a hole in the ceiling to get his signature light) and so it doesn't make sense the light would be parallel.
Well, the reason could simply be that we're dealing with a painting, and Caravaggio had every right to have a parallel light beam if he so desired. I, on the other hand, could not for the life of me get this effect without employing post production tools and so had to be content with my non-collimated beam.

View fullsize

View fullsize

To give the photo the painterly look it has I followed a workflow learned in a course about the theory of colour by Kate Woodman, a photographer I admire very much, in big part because of her knowledge and use of art history and theory in her work. Her workflow involves softening luminosity transitions and increasing the dynamic range of the image as well as split toning it and treating different colours individually, which helps tie together the colours in a cohesive way. On top of that I added some specific adjustment to make the photo more similar to Caravaggio's painting.

One thing I did very wrong in post was leaving to the end some healing and cloning of details, something that should be done early on in a healthy workflow. I was so excited to get into colour work that I jumped right to it and this made any later change way more complicated and time consuming than it could have been.

This photo was a good opportunity to learn about colour use and balance in a frame, as well as a reminder of the different tools we got as photographers to control where the eye goes. It was very interesting to review, via the reproduction of some elements in the painting, what the 17th century painter had done and the decisions he made.

---

* It's important to notice the handling of the painting and it's physical history might have had a role to play in the saturation of the different elements in it, but I didn't find a proof for that and thus have taken the colours as being a product of the painter's decisions.

POD n. 5 (COVID days)

Symmetry

For symmetry I decided to play with the effects of water on perception. I tried with different bowls and glasses and then different objects and angles.

The lighting setup was a simple one light flat lighting with a soft box.

Here are some examples of the objects I tried to use:

The battery picture was the first success, but it was crazy how minuscule changes made a huge effect on the warped representation through the water.

Had some fun with the thermometer too (used a warm towel to get the temperature above 39).

But the best in my opinion was the earring. Only on the 19th time I managed to get the one I ended up using, which was the closest to a perfect symmetry.

Discovered that gloves had at least one other use in these covid days.

POD n. 4 (COVID days)

Metal

“Metal day” first made me look for the scientific definition of the substance (any of a class of substances characterized by high electrical and thermal conductivity as well as by malleability, ductility, and high reflectivity of light - Encyclopedia Britannica). Of course I was drawn to the electrical part, which made me shoot all kinds of light bulbs in my place with, unfortunately, disappointing results. Meanwhile I was trying to think of all the metal instruments I own and also went to Caravaggio for some inspiration. I fell upon a detail from his painting The Crowning with Thorns, where a Roman Soldier is wearing a medieval armor while Jesus is getting his lovely crown. Then the idea came of using my bracelets and jewelry as an armor. I decided to use this opportunity to practice the three light set-up with off camera flash and my goal was to get a fashion magazine look. Tried it with different focal length and found that 102 mm gave a pretty good result.

I used my 60X60 cm softbox with a grid as key light, a silver reflector as fill and a second flash set to low intensity for a hair light to add some detail and set my dark hair apart from the background.

After what felt like forever I managed to get a photo without crazy eyes, with the knife reflecting some light while setting a nice shadow on the face.

In retrospect I think there’s a certain dissonance between the lighting effect I was going for and the subject of the photo, my pose, and the knife, that a clean bright lighting set up was simply not a good match for. The lighting ended up being way more dramatic and I think it fits the image better. Never-the-less I did edit the photo with fashion in mind rather than film, to practice this more beauty and product oriented look that I am less familiar with.

Here is the first edit I did, a quick lightroom edit where I put an emphasis on a cold-disaturated look and low contrast.

I then reworked the photo in photoshop, including retouch and some rethinking of the colours and came up with the photo above.

POD n. 3 (COVID days)

Black (To see this one you’ll have to have it full screen)

This subject sent me to educate myself a little about the colour Black in modern art, through John Gages's book, Colour and Meaning. A quote of the Japanese painter Hokusai caught my attention and got my wheels spinning:

"There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous [brilliant] black and matt black, black in sunlight and black in shadow. For the old black one must use an admixture of blue, for the matt black an admixture of white; for the lustrous black gum [colle] must be added. Black in sunlight must  have grey reflections."

This made me try to create an image made up of blacks only, different ones. If you zoomed in to any spot you would say it’s black, yet zooming out would allow a picture to appear.

Frankly I don’t think it’s a very aesthetically pleasing result. First of all I think I should have put a light on my hair too to have more detail. Secondly, I underexposed on purpose, but looking back I would have exposed correctly and then clipped out with more control the areas of my choosing.

---

* Edmond de Goncourt, 'Hokusai: les albums traitant de al peinture et du dessin avec ses preface', Gazette des beaux-arts, XXXVI (3eme per. XIV, 1895), p. 442. The translation is based on Ad Reinhardt, 'Black as Symbol and Concept', in Barbara Rose (ed.), Art as Art: the Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (1975), p. 86. I took the quote from John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London, 1999), p. 229.

POD n. 2 (COVID days)

Kitchen Textures

Today we started picking a subject for each day, which I like as this constraint allows you to channel creativity and ideas in a more focused way in my opinion. "Kitchen Textures” was the subject of the day. I decided to go all out on the idea of textures and at the same time play with the multiple exposures in-camera function. I chose three elements, spinach, red beans and steak, and had Additive as my multiple exposure mode.

Although the colours were truly gorgeous, something about the black and white made the idea of textures even stronger and also gave this x-ray look I thought was fitting.

Here’s one with the colours:

Photo of the day n. 1 (COVID days)

How to not burn your bed

To keep our juices flowing and keep exercising our creativity during the days of lockdown in Tel Aviv, our small group of photographers decided to start a photo of the day (POD) challenge, each of us submitting one photo every day. I'll be posting some of my favorites on social media, while this platform will be dedicated to the thought process behind them. I decided to use this challenge as a guide to my daily study of photography, pushing me to learn or try something new with each photograph. I believe documenting this learning process is useful on it’s own (as well as for the future), but there’s a chance it might be interesting to some people outside my head as well, so here it is, publicly displayed.

Now to the present photo. With this one I was aiming for a clean image, with a (kind of) Japanese aesthetic. The white circle is made out of a reading lamp I put against the dark wall of my bedroom and in front of it are dry flowers. I wanted to add something that would mimic the beautiful clouds or smoke sometimes seen in traditional Japanese paintings, and tried different ways to get some smoke in the picture. Unfortunately this was rather complicated. Firstly, by the fact this was all happening on my bed, and I wasn't ready to put it on fire (can you imagine, with a lockdown going on…). So any real burning was quickly (I admit, maybe not quickly enough) determined out of the question. I found the safest way to do it was to try and catch the exact moment when smoke is released by the lighting of a match, or from it's extinction in a ball of water.

The second problem with the “cloud” idea was technical and geographical. I would have liked to have the smoke closer to my source of light, so to reflect more of it. But since I don't own a remote control for my camera and have to use the timer, I'd have to press the shutter button for each photo. In order to get the smoke closer to the light I would have to climb my bed for each shot, but every time I'd do that the flowers would move and then get out of focus.

So I did what I could with what I had and after exhausting all my matches (real sacrifice for the sake of art when you consider the apocalyptical times when this is taking place), this poor trail of smoke was the option that fit the composition best. Adding smoke in post production is possible of course, but I enjoy the challenge of getting as much as possible in-camera.

In Lightroom I desaturated everything except for red and orange, both of which I skewed the hue of towards the reds and pinks. I added some luminance to the orange and added red to the highlights.