N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
Photo above, as shared by Khaled Beydoun and Wissam Nassar: sourced from israeli media which published a picture of displaced civilians who were arrested from shelter schools in northern Gaza, abused and stripped of their clothes. I’ve not stopped writing posts here at Nihil, I’ve just been unable to finish and/or publish them. Social reality…
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Caption (photo above: image from Kollar’s book Field Trip. Source: STET Photography Editions. More of Kollar’s work here. I’d say this is the exception and not the rule: sometimes authors’ statements about their work really add to it. I think this is the case: a brief and sincere text about the emotional experience that results…
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I’ve been following Nihilsentimentalgia for the past six years or so. I visit the blog every two or three months and read an entry or two. It’s an open but stable relationship. It seemed that every time I read the blog there are texts exactly matching the issues I currently grapple with, like a creepy…
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This is not one of my usual posts. In conversation with Rotem Rozental, the editor of the Shpilman Institute for Photography blog, she suggested I should take a look at a couple of her posts and that’s how I came to encounter Yaron Lapid‘s work. Featured here is Rotem’s conversation with him, along with images…
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© Gil Pasternak, Esther Pasternak, 1970s. Esther Pasternak collection of family photographs, 1946–99. Description: The defiant lion is a tombstone monument erected in 1932 to commemorate a group of eight Jewish pioneer settlers who, as the Israeli version of the story goes, fell to Arab village militias in the settlement of Tel Hai in 1920…
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Hester Vlamings, in Amsterdam’s Fur Free Exhibition, 2011 Fur free events took place this past Friday worldwide. The video below is from a “performance” (aka bleeding fashion event) that took place in Tel-Aviv. During the rally, people used slogans such as “Fur is a dead fashion,” “we don’ t want furs in Israel!” and “Unethical,…
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A person is more holy than a land, even a holy land, since faced with an affront made to a person, this holy land appears in its nakedness to be but stone and wood. Emmanuel Levinas. Josef Koudelka has become a mythical name for photography. A myth not only associated with the quality of his…
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© Yaakov Israel, all photographs from the series The quest for the man on the white donkey, 2011 “As referred by the Jewish tradition the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey. Few years ago, as I was taking photographs near the Dead Sea a Palestinian man rode past me on his…
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“…Israeli soldiers’ use of social media has given a unique insight into an “army” that functions more like a rabble – with soldiers misusing weapons, breaking laws, and expressing violent and extreme views and posting images of themselves doing it online. A case in point is Osher Maman, another 20-year-old Israeli soldier currently enlisted in…
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© Shira Klasmer, Walking the Line, 2012. 10’34” in loop “The ‘painting’ is performed by the artist holding a ‘brush’ made up of a line of LED lights. The act (of painting) is photographed by two still digital cameras creating a single still frame of long exposure, capturing the traces of the action on to…
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© Assaf Shaham, Untitled, from the series Time After Time and Again “The work Time after Time and Again deconstructs photography into its components and reassembles them on one surface that encompasses the essence of the photographic act, the fundamentals of color photography, and the marvel that combines light and time into a photograph.…
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© Yanai Toister, Bouy (From Register of Facts), 2004, C-print, 156/120 cm © Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 80/100 cm © Yanai Toister, Untitled (from Straits), 2002, C-print, 65/80 cm “In order to formulate a binding stand with regard to the photographs in the exhibition, one must first acknowledge that the word “photography”…
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all photos © Adam Hinton in Gaza, 2012 all drawings © Joe Sacco, taken from Footnotes in Gaza, 2010. An interview with Joe Sacco about the book and the massacres reported in it here Articles about the Palestine/Israle conflict can be accessed via Stop the War Coalition
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CRITICAL IMAGE: MICHAL HEIMAN, By Dr. Ariella Azoulay Michal Heiman chose the position of the spectator looking at someone else’s photographs taken by someone else, in which someone else is photographed, which someone else collected. Heiman turns this quintessential position of spectator (in a museum, but not only) into her own, elaboration and giving it…
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© Sheffy Bleier, Organs,, from the series Organ Gardens, 2007 © Sheffy Bleier, Internal Landscape in the Pink Outside, 2009 “Ultimately, the question that lurks in these images is that of the possibility of reaching the sublime, the spiritual through the medium that appears wholly antithetical to it – body’s inner organs. True, the organs…
Read More© Elad Lassry, Burmese Mother, Kittens, 2008 © Elad Lassry, Two wolves, 2008 “Rarely is there enough visual information in a photograph by Elad Lassry to quite tell what is going on in the picture. Thatʼs the reverse of what most photographs intend, dedicated as they typically are to delivering data selectively plucked from the…
Read More© Ori Gersht, Blow up No. 14#06, from the series Time after time, 2008 “The latest digital technology has enabled Gersht to create contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of Fantin-Latour and other still-life masters into a contemporary context. His photographs echo the appearance of oil paintings and allude to the inherent shadow…
Read More© Angelike Sher, AC/DC 2, from the series Thirteen, 2007 © Angelike Sher, Pink slippers, from the series Thirteen, 2007
Read More© Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Untitled #2, from the series August 06, 2006 © Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Untitled #6, from the series August 06, 2006 “The images in the series “August 06″ were taken in the summer of 2006, during the cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon. These photographs portray Ickowicz’s view of the war a dark…
Read More© Adi Nes, Hagar, from the series Bible, 2006 © Adi Nes, Untitled, from the series Soldiers, 2000 © Adi Nes, Untitled, from the series Soldiers, 1998 “Staged photography, the style which I’ve adopted, demands complex production and exacting direction, if for no other reason than a great deal of money and energy are poured…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 