* Horror Vacui - (a Latin - derived term) meaning, " Fear of emptiness." 

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For over 10 years now I have been constructing an archive, absent of order or hierarchy.

My collecting is compulsive, not scientific; My photographic work is largely the concrete expression of an obsession with something intangible. The work is akin to that of obsessive compulsives, for whom the property they collect functions as a protective wall cutting them off from the world. There is one significant difference, I collects living people, an archive of images of living bodies.

 

There is no way to begin the story of this work without the private biography that is the blood of labour. I was 17 when my mother died; My family and I were her caregivers in the period before her death.  The smell of death, of trying to hold on to life, of daily Sisyphean cleaning of bodily secretions and of rotting flesh on the body which was still alive, is all engulfing from the earliest stages of the work.

 

I began my photographic career by photographing the women closest to me. When the inventory was exhausted and the thirst to find the one woman who would forever be absent from this photographic collection was dissatisfied, I began to appeal to women i did not know and started to set intimate photographic meetings with them.

I searched for women everywhere.

 

The photographic session usually takes place in the homes of the women and is experienced almost as a show - deviated from reality, the creation of an artificial cell in the flow of life.

The truly meaningful encounter with the women began paradoxically only when I was alone again, and the smells of the chemicals began to fill the darkroom.

Only at this stage am I able to study them in depth, retrospectively, and only at this stage do I leave my most significant mark on the figure: through various manipulations that transmit to the photographic material, the characters usually suffer injuries and bruises, stains and blemishes.

The women began to pile up, on the walls of the house, on the floor, on the furniture - I printed obsessively, the bodies piled on each other like a kind of a huge sister's grave, trying to preserve this "army of women" while digging a grave for them. Those who acted as models are all living women, for the time being. the use of traditional photographic techniques, black-and-white printing overlaps them prematurely, attributing them to the world that has passed, lost, dead. I search for the dead mother in life, but instead of the desired resuscitation I achieve the opposite result, the death of the living. Photography after all will give all these women a sort of life after they themselves are buried.

These battalions, which are layers of images in a larger archive than the sum of its parts, become a protective army and symbolise something abstract beyond themselves. This is not one woman or another but a concept.

 

My look may be deceptive. On the surface, a re-reading of the masculine gaze that has always mediated women and their private sovereignty, the exposed body, into a spectator. But as the process progressed, this look began to appear, disturbingly, as strikingly masculine: it became evident to me that in a way I have turned these women into material.

And with time, the gaze becomes external, not looking inward but concentrating more and more on the surface, the body, the material, the mass. The private features, against their will, began to be erased by virtue of the mass and volume that the work had accumulated. Another woman, another woman and another woman, all joined the archive whose name does not recognise the uniqueness of the subjects that make it.

My photography began, more and more, to take on a kind of research-scientific, perhaps, or criminal or criminological; systematic study.

 

Then the men appeared. I moved to East Germany and began to hunt for new prey, The reversal of roles was first completed.

The dressed man who looks at the woman undressing for him, and subdues this body into eternal exposed nakedness, is now the woman artist.

The arena, German soil, is charging the work all the more forcefully.

For in the absence of a mother, I am still a searching child, who controls myself through the medium on a growing line of grown men.

The naked men, it turned out, were much more uncomfortable than the women. with limp limbs, exposed and vulnerable.

By the time it reached German soil, my work seemed to be indifferent to time and place; temporarily, timeless and non-local. But the place is never neutral, and this realisation gradually faded as I walked through the streets and forests of post-war East Germany, where everything still smelled of the forced occupation of a society that was already crumbling, a space littered with monuments and testimonies of another time.

The action on German soil actually became an essential element of my work.

Suddenly, my work, which expropriates the personal and private elements from the photographed beings, transforms them into a pure physical element, a mechanism whose action reminisces the crime of the Nazi machine that expropriated the same personal element from the human being in favour of the "non-private,

reduced humans into a body / body mixed with other bodies / bodies stacked together.

The mass physical mix on the enormous walls that I build earlier erased the identity, but now I began to feel that I was making a distinct use of the raw material as raw material.

 

The last few years I have found my work is changing very much into colour into nature, in a way almost back into life, the celebration of life.

From mass installations of individual people stacked together I have found my way lately into more and more group photos which are bringing strangers in an intimate empowering experience together.   

As I myself am growing away from my own grief my works as well are evolving. it is not only focusing on women, men, germans jews, but on Life as it is. I'm allowing my work to be Happy, to have hope , beauty and light.

My work has always been a documentation of the synergy between life and death. While my ongoing project draws from my personal history it has now evolved into a broader discussion about Jewish history, or my relationship to it. and now over the years my series of portraits has extended to become a human, existential record; a proof of existence.