Photography | Ariane Littman

The Muse, portrait of the Artist and Her Muse 2020

ContentManager — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 14:47:46 +0000

The Artist and Her Muse, a portrait

After a decade of having used sterile gauzes in performances to heal national, historical as well as personal wounds inscribed in the memory of the landscape, the city, the map and the body, I reveal the muse behind the Wounded Land Project.

Following an accident in 2009, my daughter Kalia suffered 3^rd degree burns and needed skin grafts. For over a year her wounds had to be dressed with sterile gauze, creams, silicon and other special bandages. Dressing her wounds at home became part of a painful daily routine, whilst in the studio I would dress wounded cartographic maps of Jerusalem that had been incised and grafted anew. Over the years her gauzes became the medium for acts of healing as a motherly ‘Tikoun’ (repair), love and compassion.

In September 2020, we performed together at the Dead Sea, near the site where she was wounded, a site with a geological and historical wound as well. For a studio portrait I looked for a technique that would embody the wound, not only by its physical depiction but also through the medium itself.

The imperfections and disturbing beauty of the portraits realized in wet-plate collodion process appealed to me even more after I learned its history. Collodion, a flammable solution of nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol was first used in 1847 by John Parker Maynard for surgical dressing and it was even used during the Vietnam War to reduce bleeding before soldiers reached the hospital to be stitched up. Collodion has a violent history as an explosive material (blasting gelatin) invented by Alfred Nobel in 1875 and as a photographic process invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. All these contradictory elements of healing, blasting and creation, embodied in one solution felt the right choice for this portrait. There are not many contemporary photographers using this complex process requiring special skills and a heavy archaic material. Edward Kaprov, a talented Russian-Israeli artist photographer based in the Tel Aviv area, who after 20 years of documentary photography switched to the wet-plate collodion process made this work possible.

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The Lonka Project 2019

ContentManager — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 18:04:54 +0000

The Lonka Project created by Rina Castelnuevo and Jim Hollander is a photographic tribute to the last Holocaust survivors with us today. Throughout 2019 some 250 of the world’s leading professional photographers, in some 24 countries, generously contributed their time and talent, each capturing a Holocaust survivor in the context that makes a unique and memorable statement about their lives. The Lonka Project was launched in January 2020 marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

When asked to participate in the project, I contacted Dr. Klapish who had been my psychoanalyst 30 years ago and with whom I still kept close contact. Our meetings took place in her small office where she receives her patients, it was now my turn to listen to her moving story. A hidden child together with her mother in Southwestern France during the WWII, Dr. Nicole Klappish was only 5 years old when her father, a well-known practicing dental surgeon, David Wittman was arrested in Paris in 1941 while attending to a patient. He was sent to the internment camp of Compiègne before being deported to Auschwitz where he died in 1942. The story of Dr. Klapish thereafter is a long lesson in courage. Eventually she immigrated to Israel with her husband and two children in 1970 and 4 years later she opened her own clinic in Jerusalem, exercising both as a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, often volunteering her skills to those in needs till these very days.

https://www.thelonkaproject.com/

Photo Ariane Littman, assisted by Udi Katzman

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The Mount of Olives 2014

ContentManager — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 18:50:10 +0000

Bandaged feet, Mount of Olives’ Jewish Cemetery, Jerusalem

In May, Max Jacot asked photographers from the Collective UPJ to take part in a project stretching over several continents. Two weeks before we were told to photograph our feet and the sky, the date was set to June 14, my hour would be 4 pm. I had no idea where I would shoot, I thought it would have to be a decision I would feel that same day. Intuition is what carries me through my artworks, even if there is a thread binding them, there is always a big part of unknown.

On Friday I decided I would go to the Jewish Cemetery of the Mount of Olives, I went to my studio and took bandages. It felt right. A days before three Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel (16), Gilad Shaer (16), Eyal Yifrah (19) had been kidnapped, no one knew their whereabouts or if they were still alive. Bandages had been a material I had used since 2009 for the works related to Wounded Land and a week before I had performed “Compassion” at the Lepers Hansen House in Jerusalem.

Upon arriving at the Mount on Saturday, as I walked among the graves, I remember thinking about the teens. I looked for ancient graves and when I found one covered with fodder plants I stopped. I stood in front of it and took pictures of my bare feet on the soil, then on the stone, I photographed the sky above my head and the myriad of tombes spread all around me. At some point I dressed my feet with the bandages and photographed again the sky and the grave.

Little was I to know that two weeks later the bodies of the 3 Israeli teens, kidnapped by the Hamas, would be discovered not far from Hebron and that a few hours later three Jewish extremists (aged 29 and 17 years-old) would avenge them in a horrendous way by kidnapping and burning alive 16 years-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir from Shuafat. Their deaths sparked riots in the West Bank and 50 days of war in Gaza and Israel.

Somehow it was like a déja-vu: in June 2006, Gilad Shalit had been abducted by the Hamas and held in captivity for 5 years in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. A month later in July 2006, Udi Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were abducted in Israel along the Lebanese border, sparking the Second Lebanon War. Two year later their coffins were returned in exchange of Hezbollah prisoners.

In 2006 I had created the work: Missing, showing three white shirts flying in the wind, like white flags.

For the show Max Jacot and Béatrice Darnal created with the 19 images flags to be exhibited in the Botanical Garden of the Museum in La Rochelle

To read more about the show “Marelle” in French see La Fabrique de L’Image

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Blazing Shield (2005)

ContentManager — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 21:33:46 +0000

Ways of seeing being definitely a subjective matter, pictures usually represent a more or less ‘concealed’ reality. Sometime reality isn’t what we actually see, as it depends on what one wants to see, on what one is conditioned to see or on what one is allowed to see.

Yet over the years, I came to believe that there is an ‘essence,’ a truth beyond the surface of the visible, that will eventually come to light and which belongs to a different dimension, although I might ignore it at the time of the shooting.

The series Blazing Shield is one such an example.

In this series of 5 pictures, one sees a welder whose simple actions are concealed by a ball of fire slowly overtaking and destabilizing the whole setting. The blazing lights of the forge and the faceless man brings about a dimension which best expressed the uncanny feeling of the place.

This series was photographed in November 2005 in a factory in the North of the country. The factory produced special armoring shield that was sent for American army vehicles stationed in Iraq.

The man I photographed, covered with protective clothing and wearing a welding helmet, was busy welding an iron segment I could barely see among the dazzling sparks of ultraviolet and infrared lights. At some point, he lifted his helmet and turned towards me. He reminded me of a character from a baroque painting.

More recently I learned that the security measures around the factory has been increased some years ago and that photographing today would be much more difficult…

March 2014

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Letters to God (2005)

ContentManager — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:17:42 +0000

The series of photography entitled ‘Letters to God’ was first photographed in 2005 when I went with several other photographers and journalists to a dead letter postal office in one of Jerusalem’s industrial zone. There I saw hundred of letters piling up in several boxes and mail boxes entitled: ‘Letters to God.’ The mail box addressed to members of Parliament (Knesset) was empty, true one can always find politicians’s addresses, while God, where should we find him?
I followed with the other photographers the post van taking load of letters to the Wailing Wall to see how these letters, after being opened and folded in a ceremony overseen by the Western Wall chief rabbi, were squeezed by his workers in between the cracks of the stones. I was told that once a year, these letters are taken out from the Wailing Wall and buried in the Holy ‘Land.’

In 2010 I went back to this postal office, located in an industrial zone of Jerusalem, in order to photograph once more these letters addressed to God, to Jesus or to various holy places as I felt that these letters sent by believers from various faiths and from all over the world best reflected Jerusalem very special attraction. I liked the juxtaposition of the names of God, Jesus and Marie with the profane modern icons such as John Wayne, Queen Elisabeth on the stamps…
I took pictures of some of the letters but without the name of the senders as to keep their privacy.
An envelop from France sent to the Wailing Wall had a stamp in Hebrew saying, “address incomplete, sent back to sender,” .

When asked to choose an image that best represented Jerusalem to the A5 Magazine Jerusalem issue published in cooperation with the Jerusalem Season of Culture, I decided to send one of the pictures from this series.

The post Letters to God (2005) first appeared on Ariane Littman.

Pope Benedict XVI in the Holy Land (2009)

ContentManager — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:33:15 +0000

In May 12th 2009, I photographed the Mass of Pope Benedict XVI in the Kidron Valley. As I was walking towards the Valley, I decided to remain on the hill which offered me a privileged view on the backstage of this very theatrical settings. Around me a few armed policemen, I was the only photograph present.

The post Pope Benedict XVI in the Holy Land (2009) first appeared on Ariane Littman.

Lost Spaces (2009)

ContentManager — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:52:38 +0000

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1978

Strolling in Tel Aviv on Allenby Street, the soul of the street kept evading me as I faced the overcrowded kitschy stores, oversized dreamlike advertisements, beggars, street musicians and erotic night life.

One day defying an unwelcoming barricade, I entered a deserted house on Allenby 11, stepping into a forgotten world. I had come across beautiful mansions, visible but inaccessible, now I could spent a few hours in such a house. I was overwhelmed by its sphinx-like aura, by its empty spaces which like fossils attested to the reality of a previous existence and bored the traces of a magnificent past in the faint remains of painted walls, old staircase and iron balustrades near crumbling balconies and broken windows. I discovered the fascinating history of this house built around the turn of the 20^th century in the archives of Professor Nitsa Smoke, in charge of the preservation of historical buildings.

It was then that I set out to look for additional deserted spaces in Tel Aviv, places that no longer had addresses, some having either been recently destroyed or, like the house on Allenby 11, awaiting restoration, some disaffected factories and cisterns. All of these sites had lost their original function and were lying like empty shells on the shores of the city’s collective memory. They had become lost spaces, lost to themselves and to the city’s inhabitants oblivious of their existence as they quickly walked past them.

Among the array of marks I discovered within these lost and invisible spaces, there was something perennial in the primal architectonic shapes, in the circle, the rectangle, the square and the triangle, and something ephemeral in the designs created by countless sources of light. These invisible spaces conveyed remembrance and forgetfulness, stories of the city’s life and death.

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Smoking Utopia #2

ContentManager — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:08:53 +0000

Smoking Utopia #2 is a collaborative project undertaken together with my colleague Reuven Zahavi. It is part of an ongoing project started in 2006 called Night and Smoke, a project triggered by the violence near the Gaza border after the attack on June 25^th 2006 by the Hamas at the Kerem Shalom crossing during which Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted and which was followed by an IDF operation codename ‘Operation Summer Rain.’

Underlining our work is a concern to infuse artistic autonomy to items utterly immersed in actuality, challenging the usual disinterestedness of aesthetic language regarding the ‘here and now’ through the use of photography, 3D animation videos and manipulated interactive texts, while breaking up the customary visual and textual meaning of political events channeled through the medias.

Following the installation at the Jerusalem Workshop in 2007 where we exhibited virtual smoke as 3D animations and real smoke in the space, this time in our installation we divided the space in 3 different rooms. In the main room we had a large number of ladders scattered in the space to give a sculptural constructivist framework to our installation. In between the ladders at various heights, we installed old Tvs on shelves showing various video works relating to events that took place around the Gaza border in the past two years. In another room we exhibited photographies and prints on paper from 3D files and in another room we projected the Kissufim Labyrinth, a 3D animation work. The work was exhibited shortly before the military campaign codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’ launched by the IDF against Gaza in December 2008 in order to stop Hamas rockets attacks on southern Israel. This campaign which lasted a month and entailed much wreckage and death, especially in Gaza. Both Israel and Hamas announced a unilateral ceasefires, two days later Israel once more withdrew from Gaza.

In this violent huit-clot, the future seemed blurred by the smoke coming out from maneuvering tanks, firing artillery and rockets while the individual, like in the 3 D animation work of Kissufim Labyrinth, becomes a prisoner strolling through a labyrinth of concrete slabs.

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The Photographers (2004-2007)

ContentManager — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:34:55 +0000

In March 2002, following a terrorist attack on the popular Café Moment which took the lives of 11 civilians and injured many more, I left my studio armed with a Leica M2, hardly an up-to-date camera, in order to document the new reality of fences and checkpoints rising around the city. The urge to better understand the conflict, led me to a ‘border land’, a land where the points of friction between Palestinians, Israeli settlers and soldiers were mainly reported by the media.

Between 2003 and 2007, after acquiring more appropriate cameras, I became a freelance news photographer. The field became both my studio and a place of work. Oddly enough, although I was more directly confronted with the conflict, photographing reduced my fear and powerlessness, helping me transcending the existential chaos prompted by almost daily terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Following the construction of the Separation Wall, terror attacks in the city decreased dramatically but I became aware that it entailed harsh difficulties for the civilian Palestinian population crossing the checkpoints on their daily working trips into the city.

At first, in order to approach the checkpoints, I went with the women from ‘Machsom Watch’. Amongst these subversive women observers that describe themselves as a group of ‘civilians challenging the military on its own ground’, I found voluntaries of all age. During these gloomy days of terror and military retaliation these extraordinary women undeniably inspired me.

Later on, I joined Rina Castelnuevo, a veteran photographer for the New York Times, learning enormously from her vast knowhow. I covered the Disengagement from the Gaza Strip during the summer of 2005 and many other media events related to the conflict. Working as a freelance news photographer allowed me an increasing amount of freedom when crossing borders back and forth into Palestinian Territories. In 2006, following the Second Lebanon War, I met the Middle East correspondent for the Swiss Newspaper Tages Anzeiger, joining her on some interesting assignments.

During these years my work as a news photographer definitely influenced my installations and performances from the Border Land series and later from Wounded Land. I also exhibited a few photographic series, yet the bulk of my photos have not been yet made public.

‘The Photographers‘ series was shot mostly during the first years, probably as a result of my curiosity as a beginner watching them act. Usually informed in advance of a coming or sudden event, photographers contacted each another, providing information if lacking. In general, they acted as a team of colleagues, bound by masculine friendship, women being an accepted minority. Without any doubt, friendship or polite collegiality is important when covering events that can occasionally turn violent. In time I learned by watching them, where to stand and how to be careful in case of flare-put. I came to notice certain details like the disturbing ‘voyeurism’, particularly during funerals, or how small events could take disproportionate magnitude, especially when it involved soldiers. I realized how everyone seemed to know the rules of the game in advance, demonstrators, police, army and media, yet there was always a possibility that a small event would trigger a conflagration. Often, during important media events, such as the Disengagement, great numbers of journalists would pore in from all over the world, eager to get the ultimate picture that would be wired fast. Israel granted them close to the Gaza Strip, a place to gather and quickly move pictures and texts. Having witnessed numerous other conflicts, these foreign photographers acted in a professional way denuded of passion or overwhelming interest, on their own agendas: get the ultimate shot that suited the story. During the Disengagement, the areas were spread out and journalists had plenty of locations to cover without bumping into each another, but on other occasions they generally seemed to gather around the chosen ‘prey’. It was after noticing this, that I became interested in collapsing subject/object within the same frame. I realized that showing both the object of the subject’s interest enlarged the vision of what was actually taking place. Except for later assignments for the Swiss newspaper, I was after no ‘story’ apart from trying to make sense of the conflict and witnessing a reality around me, this granted me the liberty of looking, of making mistakes and wrong choices. At the time I did not realize the privilege I had, I was trying to find out what my story should be about and thought my pictures lacked professionalism. Only now, more than a decade later, I realise how much I learned along the way about photography, about medias and photographers, about ‘ways of seeing’ and moreover about the repetitiveness of this conflict…

September 2014

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Burial (2007)

ContentManager — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:25:06 +0000

Burial (2007) is a series of pictures showing ruins being ‘reburied’ under cement poured by trucks working on the infrastructure of the Jerusalem Light Rail which started in 2002. The ruins, uncovered during a rescue dig while putting the tracks of the light rail, are located in the main street of the Palestinian Arab neighborhood of Shua’fat in northeastern Jerusalem, bordering Pisgat Ze’ev and Beit Hanina. The ruins are remnants of a Roman Jewish settlement believed to be one of the first Jewish settlements in Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. The area is said to have been inhabited since 2000 BC and is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah as Gebim, whose Jewish inhabitants fled the Assyrian army. In 1948, Shuafat was occupied by Jordan and in 1964 the UN built a refugee camp. After the Six-Day war, the town and the refugee camp was annexed by Israel and it became part of Jerusalem Municipal District.

I watched with a strange feeling the ruins covered with white fabric slowly being flooded with cement, as I photographed this underground city becoming once more an invisible city. ‘Burial’ was one of the earlier works in what would become the ‘Wounded Land Project.’ Later as I hanged the photographs opposite my bandaged maps in my studio, I wondered if this buried city had unconsciously echoed in me as I bandaged my Jerusalem Closure Maps two years later.

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