Leora Laor
By taking only minor liberties with the Hebrew, it’s possible to render the name of Israeli artist Leora Laor in English as “my light, to the light.” This is not only very cool from the perspective of those of us whose names don’t mean anything interesting, it’s also appropriate. Because the Laor pictures now on view at Daiter Contemporary draw their uncanny power–as well as their powerful uncanniness–from an intense negotiation between the world’s light and Laor’s own.
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Obviously, all photographs depend on such a negotiation to some degree, the camera itself being the traditional site where the bargain is made. But Laor is able to bring extraordinary influence to bear on the process in her recent series, “Images of Light,” thanks to digital technology. The 53-year-old artist extracted individual frames from video of everyday scenes in a sunny Jerusalem park, blew them up, and suffused them with the electronic equivalent of colored washes. These washes interact with natural light and the inherent graininess of video to transform the photos’ subject matter, sometimes radically.
Of course, I know these thoughts have a good deal to do with my awareness that Laor took the photos in Jerusalem. But they have more to do with something timeless and apocalyptic in the images themselves. It doesn’t matter that the woman on the black ridge is wearing a light knee-length skirt and a cardigan sweater or that the man carries what may be a big plastic bag. Laor’s light takes them out of chronology altogether, placing them in what Allen Ginsberg called the “total animal soup of time.” They are here and not here, early and late, and the physical setting only adds to the mystique–since, after all, where does time behave more like soup than in Jerusalem?
Joel-Peter Witkin
