Taking in the View

For those familiar with Anna Ticho’s pastoral drawings and paintings of the Jerusalem hills, encountering her photographs – many of which are exhibited for the first time – may be surprising on two levels. First, the fact that she used photography as a tool for observation alongside working directly in nature and drawing from life is a novelty. Moreover, while her work is often associated with an emotional, unmediated, and even romantic connection to the local landscape, these photographs reveal a systematic and investigative gaze. Ticho’s familiar landscape motifs – skies, mountains, vegetation, and flowers – can be seen as a distillation of the many gazes that emerge from her photographic practice.

This approach, which considers landscape photography as a process of inquiry and meaning making, forms the point of connection between Ticho’s work and the new acquisitions from the Israel Museum’s photography collection presented in this exhibition. Most of these works were created by contemporary Israeli artists who also seek to give visual expression to the local landscape yet are not satisfied with mere documentation or with romantic representation. What they share is the use of the photographic apparatus, and all the technical mechanisms associated with it, as a means of recreating an existing landscape and presenting it in new ways – at times to the point of severing it from its original context. This process not only offers new readings of familiar environments, but also sharpens the tension between reality and representation, and between documentation and artistic interpretation.

Participating Artists: Noa Ben Nun Melamed, Dorian Gottlieb, Rafael Y. Herman, Ora Lev, Ella Littwitz, Anna Ticho
 

Ora Lev, Israeli, born 1966

The Way It Was, 2017-2018

Cameraless photography

Purchase, "Here & Now" Contemporary Israeli Art Acquisitions Committee, Jerusalem

Anna Ticho, Israeli, 1894-1980

Gelatin silver prints, circa 1970s

Ticho House Archives, Jerusalem

Noa Ben Nun Melamed, Israeli, born 1954

From the series Sea/Land, 2020

Archival pigment print on rice paper, 33 x 36.5 cm

Purchase, "Here & Now" Contemporary Israeli Art Acquisitions Committee, Jerusalem