A FORM OF VIEW

A FORM OF VIEW

BY YOAV FRIEDLÄNDER

My Grandfather Kurt fled Austria to Israel immediately after the Kristallnacht, served in the British Brigades during WWII and later in the Israeli Army. After High School I’ve joined the Israeli army myself for a mandatory service as a paratrooper, and became the fourth generation of army soldiers. I grew up in the valleys of the Judean Desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. I am native to Israel but uprooted from my past. I’d got my B.A in photography from Hadassah College Jerusalem (2011), and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Selected exhibitions: Belfast Photo Festival (2011); NY Photo Festival (2013) ; Flash Forward (2013) ; Local Testimony – Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv (2013) ; Duesseldorf Photo Weekend (2014) ; International Photography Festival, Israel (2014) ; UNICEF photo Benefit Auction, Aperture Gallery, New York (2014) ; Fresh Paint 7, Tel Aviv (2014) ; Bronx Museum of the Arts Biennial, New York (2015) ; Chinese New Year Festival, Javits Center (The Chief Curator’s Choice Award, 2016)

URL
http://www.yoavfriedlander.com/

Synopsis

My work presents a chaotic perception of an “Americanized Israeli”; composed of American culture, desert landscapes and war. It is based on the recognition that reality is mediated through images as we experience many aspects of our world through photographs and not in person. In this body of work I mix images of Scale models I build with landscapes I photograph. The models are recreations of memories, collective and personal, places I saw only through photographs and other places I could only see in photographs due to restricted access. Like photographs this scale models share an indexical relation to the origin. I make them, and photograph them with the intent that they will echo the realism of the original and bare the illusion of the photograph. While Photographs refer to reality my models refer to the images that represent that reality. Both enable external observation of a reality through its copy.  
At times we find ourselves confused when the real seems to be different from how it should be according to its own image. It seems as if ever since the invention of the photograph, reality has become augmented by its own image.