It all began with a doubt – about photography, about its ability to address the contemporary, about its capacity to contribute to discourse. And so the first works by Sharon Ya‘ari broke the uniform mould of the photographic image by alternating Israeli landscapes with discarded images he had found, with photographs of eastern Europe, of Jewish communities in Pinsk and Turike – showing events such as the opening of schools and hospitals, and emigration to America or Palestine. Photoshop was used to extract portraits from the found footage and to meld these faces from the past with landscapes of the present, amalgamating them into new visual realities. Like a sorcerer’s apprentice conjuring new presences, Ya‘ari created another state, another time, through a fragile alchemy of then and now. 

In his subsequent colour works he digitally collaged and montaged pictures from various eras to create multi-layered individual images. Each one is a single shot, but is directed in such a way that it fragments its own potential meanings, prompting different individual perceptions. Groups of people, families perhaps, can be seen making their way to the spectacle, lasting only a few days, of the iris fields in bloom. Yet they look as though they are going to a funeral, or at least to some family gathering of great import. In another photograph, coloured, indeed colourful, and even though faded and dusty, almost lurid plastic chairs with cut-out backs, like lungs, to make sitting on plastic in the heat of the summer more bearable, make for a pleasing and cheerful image until we notice, amidst the bright-hued clutter, that we are actually looking at a funeral chapel. The arrangement of these chairs in the simple room reads like the furnishing of a family constellation. We see three young women, dressed almost identically in flared jeans and skimpy, bare-shouldered summer tops, clambering through a corrugated metal barrier. One of the three women is already hunkered down to pass under a metal bar, as though crossing into the nocturnal darkness of some realm that cannot be discerned in the picture. The tangible atmosphere of a relaxed summer stroll contrasts with the uncertainty and gloom of the yawning visual abyss. In another photograph, a patch of tarmac – asphalt deposited and rolled out three or four centimetres thick – stretches along a forest path like a black tongue. The tongue is frayed, as though the material had run out. The saying “to speak with forked tongue” springs to mind here, yet if we “listen” carefully, this tongue of tar in the forest seems to speak of the absurdity to be found in small everyday acts.

In these colour photographs, Sharon Ya’ari returns to a simple, observational photography; one that observes directly but cautiously, framing contradictions, layers of overlapping meaning that reveal themselves only gradually. He has remained faithful to this form of photography ever since, though constantly undermining it by questioning the medium and filling it with reflections on the photographic gaze. What is shown and with what purpose? From which position? And how? And what does it reveal? What has just been achieved and accomplished is called into question, as is what is in demand and fashionable internationally. So, abandoning colour in photography was only a question of time.

Israel’s future should be like Europe’s past. That is the understandable, if somewhat unrealistic, wish of many immigrants. Moving forwards with a sentiment firmly rooted in the past. Central Europe is verdant, so lawns are produced, cut into strips, rolled up and then rolled out again in the “desert”. The desert should blossom, and the image of childhood, the European view of nature, should be resurrected in Israel. “New homeland” was long synonymous with transforming Israel into a land reminiscent of their own background. In the Lawns group of works, Ya‘ari documents this re-production, presenting various gassy places as in a mail-order catalogue, to order with the nod of a head, the click of a button. Carpets of grass, fields of grass as finely flower-strewn layers in the battle against wind and sand. The same approach was taken in the effort to create forests in the new land. Tree species from Europe proved unfeasible. They dried out the soil too much, or dried up themselves. We know, since Jean Piaget at the latest, that our minds and feelings are formed, directed and shaped within the first two years of life. Wherever we go, we carry within us the fundamental perspective of childhood. No matter what we encounter in the outside world, we carry inner images within us, and what we see with our eyes, and through photography, is what we want to see, wish to see, have to see. The past becomes the present, the future, even when new situations challenge our ability to uphold those times. Our perceptions are capable of repressing drastic realities, and of ignoring them, when they do not fit into our preconceived vision. Yet the future, too, soon becomes the past if it is all too unrealistically constructed.

Curious objects occasionally inhabit the photographs of Sharon Ya’ari. The object under a tree, for instance – a table with six seats. The table and seats are connected in a way that makes them appear like a cluster of metal-and-concrete fungi. The round seats, like the tabletop, each have a groove running through them that also triggers associations with the heads of metal screws. The seating is not firmly anchored to the ground. It is perched at a slant, like a slowly shifting sanddune. The future of these objects, according to the artist, has long since run out. They are de-functionalised, metamorphosing from functional objects into scrulptures, trotting in situ through time, gradually adapting to their surroundings. Why are they stuck there, and no longer used? This is the kind of casual, yet insistent, enquiry that drives Sharon Ya’ari and his photography. It also applies to the treetrunk, ripped from the ground, ravaged by wind and weather, lying in the desert as a reminder of its former energy and strength. These images tell of endeavour, of efforts great and small that have ultimately come to nothing and have eventually proved fruitless. Now they succumb to the passage of time. 

A plurality of times, of “presents”, is inscribed upon these weather-beaten everyday sculptures like a tattoo, their origins and actual purpose overlaid with different uses and different events. There they stand, abandoned, forlorn, and somewhat shabby. Even the towering Anzac monument in memory of the heavy losses sustained by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp in the second world war seems a little dreary and melancholy with the tattered net draped over its viewing platform like some vast chainmail shirt. A gravestone neglected, a death forgotten. A mammoth of recent history. For the most part unspectacular, unnoticed, visible only to the alert observer. Small shifts and changes over the course of time. Sharon Ya’ari visits them again and again through the years, watching the gradual collapse of a tree until its massive limbs eventually completely bury the picnic table placed beneath it.

Meanwhile, Sharon Ya’ari has turned once more to black and white photography. Going against the mainstream current, against the convention of perfectly enlarged, mounted or heavily framed colour fields that spread almost like an epidemic in the closing decade of the twentieth century. Sharon Ya’ari veers off course and takes a different tack, seeking his own path. He reacts with seismographic sensitivity to situations. For the longest time, photography was dominated by distance. Photographers would travel to the promised land, to Africa, or Indochina, bringing back their treasures like precious gems and presenting them to their own home audience. The photographs were a source of proof and of excitement, playing on a sense of the exotic, of acceptable otherness, in a game of visual power. 

500 m Radius breaks with this tradition by focusing on what is closest: the immediate surroundings of the home. The gaze drifts around the backyards and lingers on the neighbouring facades. Nothing looks perfectly manicured. All the forms and materials, all the objects, just seem to languish where they are – still fully functional or merely set aside and basically forgotten. Strolling around nooks and crannies, along facades, past doors and sleepy windows, through courtyards and forlorn front gardens, Sharon Ya’ari is not wandering in search of some special moment, but is out and about in the early hours on paths within a restricted radius. He has with him his first-born son, who always wakes up at five in the morning. The double negation of space and time, of spatio-temporally selected places, brings forth a series of remarkably casual, bearable, quotidian images – images in which the Bauhaus myth of Tel Aviv appears to fade without ado before a wave of gentrification rolling in to cleanse and prepare the buildings for the lifestyle of the Noughties. This is a photographic approach that deserves to be granted no small credit, given that nobody, anywhere, especially in a city so wrought with tension and even fear, lingers with impunity in such places during the wee small hours without a good reason that involves acute insight and an attitude likely to generate a well-meaning smile.

There is a similar everyday feel to the video loops, the 5, 9, 25 or 115 frame loops in his 20-60 second films that endlessly portray banal everyday movements, gestures, situation: small films composed of 5, 9, 25 or 115 still photographs, set in motion. They dwell upon a single viewpoint, a single angle, with only the shutter clicking several times to capture scenes that appear in sequence like so many little stage scenes. Morphologies of the quotidian. The 5-frame loop shows a man endlessly walking behind garden walls; he seems to be treading on the spot, ever forwards, ever in motion, yet making no progress. He stays where he is. A woman fails to pick her heavy shopping bags up from the street and carry on. A large, near-empty parking lot becomes the scene of cars arriving, departing and passing by. They sweep in, park and leave again. At times, they get in each other’s way. In another frame, trees rustle silently, blustering up and concealing what is going on in the background; a roadside telephone call seems to go on forever; a family gets in a car and drives away. These brief moments are transformed by the endless loop into scenes that appear banal and absurd to the point of slapstick, casually devoted to the banality and senselessness of life itself. There is no judgment, no moral on the surface of this. It is. As it is. Things happen. As they do. Brief glimpses, fleeting efforts, without purpose. Life congeals into a sculpture of itself. It goes on, just enough to get a little further.

Ya’ari creates photography that photographs. His is a photography that “images”, creating pictures without ever addressing or imaging photography itself. This is photography for photography’s sake, in his own land. Just as Israel is constantly grappling with the question of forming and developing a nation under the given circumstances, and of generating a sense of cohesion that is not determined by fear alone, so too is the work of Sharon Ya’ari informed by the question of how to photograph what can be represented, where images can be found that do not invariably fall into the contextual trap of Yes-No, Here-There, This-That – like grasping a fruit without bruising it, photographing a country without making it appear either heavenly or diabolical. This is photography that simply does not fit the mould or conform to any category, but falls between all stools because it neither provokes nor accommodates, whether in terms of the history of photography or in terms of the history of the country. Not and notwithstanding, Israel (nevertheless) is a form of homeland, based on being-born-here, on therefore regarding the land as home, and as a place of discovery, loss, pleasure, and fear. The backyard images of 500 Metre Radius exude this same self-evident attitude that is so remarkable form of normality in a land that struggles daily to be normal. 

The Hope for Long Distance Photography, on the other hand, is bound to chafe, right from the start. The photographer and the act of photographing are inconspicuus. He can stay in the background and browse the world with a zoom lens in much the same way as an ornithologist studing birds. Yet his photographs instantly lose that good reputation – they appear as intruders, as somewhat pushy. They twist perceptions and, with that, the world itself, when they invade a space with their 500mm or 1000mm lens (discussions between photographers can sometimes sound very much like bikers boasting about their engine capacity) cutting right through to the far distance, and placing in the midst of life a rectangle that soaks up the surroundings like a blotter into which everything trickles and congeals, pressed into two-dimensionality. This “blotter” has a power of absorption that distorts what is seen, so that streets rise up in a dynamic sweep, and objects appear closer. Yet we do not feel the warmth of this closenessness because, at the same time, things disintegrate into such fragility and brittleness that they might crumble at the slightest touch and be strewn on the wind. This is photography that kneads reality, reshaping it and seemingly embracing it closely. Yet at the same time, it pushes that reality away, reflecting distance and telling of the impossibility of imposing closeness. All it can give us is a semblance of closeness.

Photography from a safe and risk-free distance might prompt suspicions of voyeurism, at least when its gaze is directed right into the living room. Yet the camera reveals so little, so very little that is spectacular, that it provokes a growing sense that the photographing subject is hoping for distance on a temporary basis, for a deferral of time in which reality is not constantly, insistently imposing itself in an endlessly all-devouring maelstrom. Is there a a sigh of relief, at least for a few moments, because reality has paused and taken a step back? Hope for long Distance Photography, hope for enough time.

Rashi Street brings Sharon Ya’ari back to reality. Like a detective, he follows a hunch that something is brewing, that something illegal may be in the works, on Rashi Street in Tel Aviv. Within just two hours, a three-storey building has been demolished, generating an impenetrable screen of dust. Clouds of dust fill the narrow street in the centre of Tel Aviv, obscuring the view. Sharon Ya’ari photographs the act of destruction with different types of film material, playing with the parallelity of dust and grain – the dust in the street, the grain of the film, the graininess of the enlarged photograph on paper. This act of destruction develops its own fascinating aesthetic without actually revealing what exactly is happening here. Was there an explosion? Why do we immediately think of a terrorist attack? A sense of uncertainty, a feeling that anything might happen at any time, permeates the triptych composed of Rashi 1-3 and the additional Rashi 4. Sharon Ya’ari is torn from his state of absent presence and present absence, and is confronted with a powerful, destructive act. 

This frame-filling evolution of a motif welling up until it laps at the very edges of the image, to the point of overflowing, can also be found in some of his photographs of thickets and bushes, in his pictures taken before and after the flood. The space closes in, fills up, pushes towards the surface and occupies the entire rectangle. The view is distorted, and breathing becomes constrained; these images seem to build up before us like a wall. The visual encounter becomes tangible, physical, confrontational. A photographic image of impermeability, intumescence and effervescence becomes a tangibly perceptible reality in the form of a visual wall in front of the viewer. In Marble (Nephton Hall) a dark, almost black, wall of pale-veined marble. It is an object rendered almost entirely on the plane, viewed at only a slight angle. It blocks and obstructs the gaze and reads like a Jackson Pollock drip-painting or a view of the earth from outer space. The swathe of marble, divided in three, appears to have been rather clumsily restored in a couple of places. It is almost as though the Long Distance photographs and the marble image seek to converge here meaningfully, yet the waterpipe suspended above, and running right across the picture, lends it a sense of place and specificity while at the same time demystifying it.

Talking to Sharon Ya’ari gives an inkling of just how much photography is both heaven and hell for him. Just as a writer might sit with pen in hand, or in front of a computer, able to concentrate only in a certain place, on a specific seat or cushion, among familiar sounds and smells, any or all of which provide the physical and mental stimulation that charges the imagination and gets the creative juices flowing, so too does Sharon Ya’ari set out with his photographic equipment, often including cumbersome 4x5-inch cameras, to wander the land and follow the trails. Going through the motions of setting out, of being on the road, seems to put him in a kind of altered state. Making his way alone, just him and his camera, lost in thought, along paths strewn with the stumbling-stones of history, daily life, or convention, which he passes by, overlooks, revisits, sometimes repeatedly – such is the atmosphere that makes him alert, focused and concentrated. Mind and body are openly receptive, taking note of things, perceiving and experiencing them. Sharon Ya’ari describes this as a very intimate moment. It is a state he seeks and savours, and one that wrenches him out of everyday banality. At the same time, it is a state he never wants to cease, and which he only reluctantly ends with the click of the shutter. The final act of photographing ends the state of limbo, bringing him back down, so that he sometimes even turns away in boredom from what he has just seen. That is when he suddenly becomes aware of the cumbersome weight of the camera. The feeling is gone; it is over. A new sense of tension has to build up again in another place. The subsequent work on the image is correspondingly complex: it involves towing the pre-conscious into the conscious, understanding his own actions and recreating their sensory and sensual basis. Out of the abjectness of coming down from such a high of tension, he has to regain his sense of joy in the image and grasp its language, but this time consciously, approaching his own self from outside. 

Sharon Ya’ari falls into a kind of daydream, into a state somewhere between rapture and self-absorption. It is a state of both flight and arrival. He seems to move within a real, physical landscape at the same time as moving within a psychological, emotional and sensual one. Rather like Hamish Fulton, albeit ultimately in search of himself, of his own existence, here in this land. Motion is the driving force behind seismographically sensitive alertness and aimless drifting. There is an awareness that even observation alone can change what is found.

Reluctant as Sharon Ya’ari may be to click the shutter, because in doing so he captures something, fixing it for all time, and because fleeting thoughts and scraps of perception definitively fuse with an object as in a chemical process of precipitation, he also composes his images in a way that exudes an air of latency, so that they remain suspended in a kind of pre-linguistic state of excitement. Signs form, meanings take shape, the latent potential of the given situation emerges – but never excessively, never going too far in the direction of of the non-ambiguous. Sharon Ya’ari clearly endeavours to keep the images open. He does not release them if their meaning is too obvious, too specific, and he chooses not to publish them for a one-dimensional, instrumentalised use. Instead, his photographs are meant to be like open fields in which we stroll around freely, and by entering into them we trigger a tension between what is shown and what is sought. An image that presents an unambiguous statement, according to Sharon Ya’ari, is no longer an image. It is a message and, as such, could just as easily be conveyed in writing. In Israel, where, more than almost anywhere else, everything has a political dimension, and everything is either-or, this-or-that, Sharon Ya’ari takes an approach almost redolent of Don Quixote, committed to all the lost and forgotten nuances, upholding the right not to be decisive, to sow the seeds without necessarily reaping the harvest. He visibly strives to create a “soft” art in the climate of a harsh political reality. Things begin to speak, combining with other signs and events to form a network, only to falter, suspended in limbo. Remarkable as they are, they make no statement, say nothing clear, but merely hint and give pause for thought. They are images that provide far more questions than answers, posing more puzzles than solutions. It is left to the viewers to consider the issues and explore their own phantom pain. Sharon Ya’ari follows the traces of deeply hidden veins that show only fragmentarily on the surface.

“All of these are looks at situations involving slow, inevitable decay….”, muses Sharon Ya’ari in conversation, then uses the phrase “tired objects”, while speaking of erosion, decay, loss of function. He speaks of “rewind[ing] the future”, and as it rewinds, of it eroding before our very eyes. In his images, Sharon Ya’ari describes a profoundly melancholy state in which the tension between the ideal and the real is nevertheless bearable. While everything decays and while time, wind and floods erode everything, sweeping away all that might be and yet is not, all that might have been and never will be, we always have to keep our heads above water. Decay is inscribed in all objects, just as change is inscribed upon the face of life itself. Sharon Ya’ari uses the image of a “disappointing wadi” as a metaphor of thwarted expectations.

In the more recent and the very latest pictures by Sharon Ya’ari it seems as though we are witnessing a gradual, constant transformation of space and time – not just in one direction, and not only forwards. In his photographs, many of them dual images, he pursues a kind of archaeology of Being, an exploration of space and time. Erosion discloses ancient layers, uncovers times gone by. History reveals itself. On the other hand, histories brand themselves onto the landscape, forming it and shaping it in ever overlapping layers. We are reminded of the butterfly effect, in which a single wingbeat can change the entire course of the world. What is, what should be, what would be, what is not: everything is inscribed upon the landscape, the objects, the furnishings of society. In Ya’ari‘s photographs, space and time are ever more closely intertwined. He moves in space like a time capsule, and he glides through time like a space capsule. In light, in shadow, at night; in colour and in black and white. Within the blink of an eye, the tree that was in view one moment is gone the next. Three young women stand by the roadside, all looking in the same direction, apparently observing something, yet relaxed and alert at one and the same time. Then there is the mother with child, gazing into the distance, her hand pensively raised to her face, and there are the women, men and dogs wandering around, roaming the fields, just waiting and looking. The bus shelter, photographed from front and back, is meant to provide refuge, yet it more strongly symbolises waiting. A light goes on and, for a fleeting moment, we recognise something. The light goes off and it disappears again. It is in these small acts and gestures, which Sharon Ya’ari photographs alone or in dual images with carefully orchestrated slowed-down or accelerated timing, that possibility and impossibility become manifest. There is “a shimmer of possibility”, to quote an extensive work by Paul Graham with which the work of Sharon Ya’ari has much in common. It is a shimmer of the possibility of small gestures and small movements, of imperceptible little efforts, a glimpse of the potential that lies in the uncovering of a layer, in the shining of a light, or in the moment when someone sets out to do something. 

Nagala mound 3 shows a family sitting outdoors in a field on a large bench set on a wooden platform. It is a recreation area, a park marked by the provisional and the decaying. They are sitting on a wooden structure that is set, in turn, upon history and its stories, on drought and flood, bouying up the family, which seems to hover in the air. They gaze outwards, introspectively. Being there.

(All Sharon Ya’ari quotes are from conversations with the author during the spring of 2013.)