The 2011 Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist has been awarded to Ilit Azoulay (b. 1972) and Liat Elbling (b. 1980). The artists represents a significant trend prevalent recently in Israeli photography, centering on a renewed discussion of seeing, remembering and documenting, through the use of processing, simulating and assembling—originating in direct photography but removed from it, thus creating paradoxical environments.
Liat Elbling, (A) Part #50888970, 2011, Color print, 35X50.
Ilit Azoulay creates in her works a staged environment with an inquiring typological—yet fictitious and enigmatic—appearance. Like an archaeological study that sorts and catalogues findings from the past, she collects remnants of the present and applies onto them a clear regularity of gaze and photographic conditions, and assembles a continuous pictorial sequence devoid of thematic meaning. The space achieved in the final photograph subverts the spatial logic of sensual vision, its photographic representation and their (the gaze’s as well as the photograph’s) interpretation through the human brain, i.e. with consciousness tools.
Liat Elbling creates in her works a meticulously measured spatial disruption, emphasizing the tension between visibility and visual structures, between consciousness and visual perception, between photography and memory. Elbling photographs architectural buildings, landscapes or interpersonal situations, and in the processing stage removes, adds and changes significant details within them. The resultant photographic illusion seemingly maintains the visual principles of order within the original material, but casts doubt over or neutralizes its basic contents and functional quality.
