PAST EXHIBITION

The Photo Album, 1979-­80

Igael Shemtov

Artist Talk: February 12th | 7 pm

Baxter St is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the artist Igael Shemtov, curated by the artist Rona Yefman, one of his former students at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he was Chair of the Photography, Video, and Computer Imaging Department from 1994-2000.

The main focus of the exhibition is Shemtov’s series ‘The Photo Album, 1979-80,’ a project that he intended to publish in the early 80s but that is only now being published as a limited edition artist book of two volumes.  In this body of work Shemtov looks at lower-middle-class living environments in Israel during that period, depicting both interiors of private homes and exterior public spaces. Photographing in color with a “family album” snapshot aesthetic; he creates images that combine a sense of transience and poverty alongside his subjects’ embrace of kitsch.

The exhibition affords a rare opportunity to see the work of this influential teacher, many of whose students have achieved notability, including Adi Ness, Yael Bartana, Elinor Carucci, David Adika, Ilit Azulay, Sharon Balaban, Nir Evron, Dor Guez, Yefman herself, and many more.

Igael Shemtov’s photography work combines personal critical expression with a documentary approach.  His unique sensibility is conveyed through the very sites he chooses to photograph, and the often-harsh reality he depicts is imparted through a deeply considered and critical point of view.

While creating The ‘Photo Album,’ Shemtov was working as a quality controller at Kodak’s main photography lab in Israel, where he saw large quantities of family snapshots. In thinking about their basic components, he realized they shared certain aesthetics qualities: a simple composition, focus on a single object (positioned at the center of the photograph, and thus endowed with meaning), and a lack of technical refinement, evident, for instance, in the presence of a harsh on-camera flash or motion blur. The naïve family snapshot, therefore, served as a powerful source of inspiration, a conceptual antithesis to his previous and later work.

For this show, Shemtov and Yefman have selected approximately 70 photographs from the series, of which only 16 were previously exhibited at the Open Museum of Photography Tel-Hai Industrial Park, in Israel in 2009.

The artist and curator will be present at the opening night reception and will participate in an artist talk at the gallery in Baxter St at CCNY’s Conversations Series.