In “Mars #9,” Sher digitally removes the sky to focus attention on the Al-Aksa Mosque’s “gold color, the night scene, the architecture.”
by Caroline Lagnado Special To The Jewish Week
When Israeli photographer Tamir Sher came to New York for the first time recently, he saw his images of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — the cities he photographs so frequently — with fresh eyes, unburdened by the familiar and the routine. “What seems so regular and daily for me [in Israel], looks so unique in New York,” he said.
This is precisely the way he wants the viewer to look at his photographs.
Take his striking image of Jerusalem’s iconic Al-Aksa Mosque now on view at the Point of View Gallery in Chelsea, part of Sher’s first solo show in New York. Sher doesn’t want the viewer to notice the glittering mosque at first. Instead, he wants you to absorb the
basic elements of the picture, “Mars #9” — the “gold color, the night scene, the architecture. This way I give the possibility to the viewer to give [a] second thought to the place,” Sher said by phone from his home in Tel Aviv. By using his lens to hone in on details, Sher makes a big city, like Jerusalem, smaller. Sher began work on his “Mars” series of the Tel Aviv region after seeing photographs taken by a recent space shuttle of the planet Mars and wondering how creatures of another world might see our civilization. His photographs are dark and feel vacant, their sparseness highlighting his bleak urban subjects set against a black, missing, sky. Sher took these images on slides before scanning and digitally removing the sky from them. “After Mars” came next; the images in this series are unmanipulated, lighter and brighter. “I move and change all the time: from simple to manipulated prints,” Sher observed. In “After Mars,” Sher brings life into closer view. Children are shown laughing and screaming, gazing up at the sky in wonderment. The lighting remains dramatic, while the colors are richer, as in “March,” a verdant garden scene highlighting green leaves and grass, spotted with bits of colorful flowers. The gallery’s mixing of these two differently handled series presents a nice contrast of dark and light, vacant and peopled. Using a clean and uncomplicated style to focus in on details, Sher artistically displays the small pieces that compose his life in Tel Aviv. At the recent “After Mars” opening,
Sher had to explain the functions of a few typically Israeli elements found in his photographs to his New York audience. The solar water heaters adorning some buildings (and not normally found on American roofs) have garnered questions. Some of his photographs in the “Mars” series of buildings in Tel Aviv show walls and fences. These elements of city life have even inspired questions about the Arab-Israeli situation. “When people see a wall, they think of the conflict, but for me it’s just urban architecture,” said Sher. Urban scenes are prevalent in this show as Sher lives and works in central Tel Aviv. He and his wife, the novelist and teacher Iris Leal, balance their artistic careers with raising their two children, Ariel, 14, and Itamar, 6. Sher knew he was an artist from a young age. “I recognized how I saw things — it was different from how other people saw and absorbed things,” he said. His childhood on Kibbutz Kfar-Masarik meant Sher had little privacy and used photography as a tool of introspection, eventually becoming class photographer. Sher received his first camera from his father when he was 8. He has since worked as a photographer while serving in the Israeli army, before studying at the Camera Obscura school in Haifa. Besides creating his own artwork, Sher now teaches photography at the Camera Obscura school in Tel Aviv and privately consults other professional photographers on their work and technique. Sher’s work, only now beginning to gain popularity here, has been exhibited in both group and solo shows all over Israel. In March he will present new work, including images he shot while here in New York, at the D & A Gallery in Tel Aviv. Though most of his images are taken in and around Tel Aviv, Sher sees his photographs as universal. In a previous series, exhibited at Tel Aviv’s Limbus Gallery, Sher took pictures of Mount Heria, the man-made mountain of garbage near Israel’s airport. Shot at different times of day, in different light, Sher adopts a similar preoccupation as Monet did with his haystacks. To Sher, “this garbage mountain is not just any mountain but every mountain.” As he travels around his city on his motorbike, Sher trusts his instinct to be his guide as ideas build in his mind for a new series, “I start from my intuition — my stomach and heart — and then I work with my tools.” This premeditated technique allows him to capture just the moment he is seeking. For the photo of the Al-Aksa Mosque found in the “After Mars” show for example, Sher negotiated with Chabad in Jerusalem to let him take the image from their house. While they wouldn’t let him shoot their property, they allowed him on top of their yeshiva to capture just the angle he was after. “The view from this roof is amazing,” Sher noted of the Jewish building tucked inside the largely Muslim neighborhood — “all the Muslim buildings and a few Israeli flags among them.” This attention to vantage and detail is characteristic of Sher’s work, and allows viewers to see his world through his artistic eyes. Tamir Sher’s photography show, “After Mars,” runs through Jan. 5 at Point of View Gallery, 638 W. 28th St. Call for hours. (212) 967-3936.
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