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.
