All of the work shown here was made between August to December 2000. They are the product of a continued interest in the urban space of Tel aviv, which was first explored during my last year in school. I see it as a work still in progress, not fully defined.

The photographic gaze of this work is most often strict, harsh. It tends towards the cold and the un-sentimental. This coldness\harshness is its main tool in the atempt to deal with the complexity and polarity of the city. The abundance of visual stimulation, the fantastic "noise" of its streets, roads, buildings, back yards, parks, driveways, parking lots, and vacant lots, makes Tel Aviv an urban cacofony.

The cold, long gaze; the clarity of detail; and the stillness of the photographic image, particularly that of the old-fashioned large format camera, is my way of dealing with this cacofony.

The goal of my efforts is that from these images will emerge a critical statement on the city as an urban space. As this is still a work in progress, the definition of this statement is not fully complete, and I doubt that it will ever be: the reality of the city will keep being too complex, too erratic, to be reduced to a coherent statement. As the American photographer Steven Shore once said: "the world is infinitely more interesting than anything I have to say about it".

 

Hagai Kaufman

December 2000, Tel Aviv