Foreward

In his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes attempts to pinpoint the secret of photography “in itself”. As initial observations for these reflections he maintains: “From the first step, that of classification (we must surely classify, verify by samples, if we want to constitute a corpus), Photography evades us. The various distributions we impose upon it are in fact either empirical (Professionals / Amateurs), or rhetorical (Landscapes / Objects / Portraits / Nudes), or else aesthetic (Realism / Pictorialism), in any case external to the object, without relation to its essence, which can only be (if it exists at all) the New of which it has been the advent; for these classifications might very well be applied to other, older forms of representation. We might say that Photography is unclassifiable. Then I wondered what the source of this disorder might be.

The first thing I found was this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché,¹ the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression.”²

The closer I became acquainted with Aviv Levin’s photographs, the more I felt the need to return to those basic categories of sights unfolding before us at any given moment, as long as we are conscious of what is visible; to try and fathom them anew, to shed a new light on them – the same light which Levin’s camera captured.

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), pp. 53-66.
2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.: Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 4.

Aviv Levin: Reflective Photographs

Curator: Shiri Broza

Aviv Levin’s photographs document natural scenery, urban scenes, and people with optimism, humor and compassion. They are the result of photographic journeys in Tel Aviv, in Israel and around the world, and are rooted in the tradition of documentary photography. Levin (1932-2006) used to observe and record sights he encountered, without interfering with the photographed object. At the same time, through the camera, he generated picturesque compositions typified by harmony of color and form, inclined toward abstraction. Thus, the photographs of people featured in the exhibition elicit curiosity, while formally tending toward minimalism or the abstract.

The poetic quality in Aviv Levin’s work stems from his humanist approach to the photographic object, alongside a tendency to focus on textures and reflections that infuse the work with ambiguities. In the photographs of water reservoirs, the reflected objects take part in interplays of light and color, assuming and shedding form. The documentary, yet lyrical, style invites the viewer on an adventure into realms oscillating between reality and a dreamlike, imaginary world.

In many of Levin’s photographs the composition is more dominant than the depicted object. Thus, for example, a close-up of the side of a fishing boat covered with layers of peeling paint pays homage to abstract painting. In the sky photographs, the subject matter is often but a pretext to capture forms, colors and light, and to translate his impressions, feelings and thoughts into images imbued with atmosphere. The photographs are often blurred, having been shot through wet glass or the window of a moving car, as in a photograph of an avenue of trees in the rain. The object in these works is a vehicle and a lever for the photographic act which strives for an abstract image, free of any concrete object, concurrently addressing motion, journey, and time.