Ariel Reichman meets artist Uri Gershuni in Tel Aviv.

A mysterious atmosphere lingers in this exhibition. The viewer feels like a privileged guest entering a forbidden place, a place not meant to be open to everyone. It seems that along with your attempt to depict an authentic picture of place in which photography actually occurs, you try to convey your fears, or perhaps create that very fear in the viewer: that the light is doomed to vanish, rendering photography no longer possible.
My journey to Lacock was inspired by a strong belief in our capacity to still be moved. With an almost nihilistic thought I was inspired to challenge the validity of the very paradigm that portrays our world, that of images repeated and over-swamped to the point of redundancy, which leave us always with a sense of „de ja vous“.

Despite all that, I believed there was a spark I could start a big fire with.

I believed in the uniqueness of each man’s encounter with the world capable of producing extraordinary excitement. One of the things I love about photography is the variety of spheres in which it manifests itself: professional art, amateur, family, tourist and commercial. I look for the overlaps and contradictions among all these spheres. I went to Lacock with the same motive of traveling that drove me to Berlin.

With no obligations
Yes. Without pre knowledge, without prejudice.

I wanted to meet what is different, the strange, to touch the unfamiliar, to search, and hopefully to find it.

The journey starts with an alleged motivation, I went to meet Talbot but the anticipation to meet him also involved an a priori feeling of sure disappointment. After all, the meeting was destined to be barren as Talbot obviously would not be there, only his spirit. Indeed, I was accompanied by ghosts in this journey. At times it even felt as if they became real, I felt obligated to them.

There is a strong feeling of authenticity and honesty in the photographs. Despite the manipulation – I believe them, I believe you.
I let myself experience the world around me in a primary way and to set aside presumptions which I find limiting. For example, I’ve never photographed landscapes before and I was enchanted by the nature. I felt as if I was a Natural Geographic photographer, mesmerized by every drop of dew on a spider’s web. In the end, the photography process is filled with an inner paradox: materially speaking, I’ve added a kind of filter to the camera, yet at the same time spiritually there is a process of abstraction, of removing the filters.

Uri Gershuni, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, 2010, inkject print, 30×40 cm, framed 60×80

Without knowing this, there is a confusing feeling as if these are products of a home-made chemical lab, or as if you added a graphics-editing- program’s filter.
I agree, what appears in the photographs as chemical intervention is actually an artificial, digital code. In my works I reflect upon the bodiless being of a photograph. The photograph is always a mere reflection of something as opposed to drawing, which always carries with it its own body. I had a longing for that fullness of a body. This is one of the emblems of the exhibition. Indeed, there is a feeling as if the photographer was really engaged with the chemicals, touched the materials, but this is an allusion.

The delusional feeling – not being able to tell true or false, reality and image, material and spiritual – is something I’ve carried with me since I was a child.

It’s part of my biography, as I was raised amongst a family of artists – image makers. In my case the family of art was also my own, heredity became heritage. My biological father is also a father figure for a whole generation of Israeli artists.
For me, the world of images is more real than reality itself. I could have almost touched it as if touching a real body. I went to Lacock to find myself a vanished father, I want to embrace this absent body, to touch the flesh that had rotted and disappeared long ago.