The photos of Shlomo Israeli observe without yielding utterly to the the objectivity of what they capture. There’s typically something on the wing in Israeli’s pictures: something furtively animate, if not quite displaced. This could be a head of hair, a cityscape in motion, or a succession of boats on water. In all these cases, what’s brought to the light of the photographic lens is time. Israeli’s photos fixate on time in all its forms—aging, motion, the perspectival diminishment of an object as it recedes into the horizon.
Israeli has realized a mode of photography that hovers somewhere between the cinematic and documentarian. The photo Back and White, for example, focuses on the back of a woman’s head. As indicated by the picture’s title, however, the subject-matter is not so reductive. The white-haired woman’s black suit is like the darkness of night. Her hair, by contrast, seems to gently sway in wind, almost forming a piece with the patterned wood on the left side of the image.
