Assaf Shaham

Acquired directly from the artist

Jerusalem, Bloomfield Science Museum, Other Lives, 2012-2013 (another example exhibited)

This work is in excellent condition with bold, bright colors. Not viewed out of frame.
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PROPERTY SOLD TO BENEFIT THE SHPILMAN INSTITUTE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY (Lots 38 - 48)

The SIP’s public research collection of photographs reflects the Institute’s profound interest in studying different realms of the photographic medium. The collection, numbering over 900 works, focuses on historical images, contemporary Israeli and international photography. Conceptually, the collection focuses on photography’s disengagement from traditional documentary approaches and towards the discovery of other modes of action in the artistic field. The Israeli collection features central works of Israel’s most prominent contemporary photographers, dating from the 1970s to recent years.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ISRAELI PHOTOGRAPHY by Gideon Ofrat

Perhaps, the most significant momentum in contemporary Israeli art pertains to the field of photography. Outstanding Photography departments in art academies and in leading museums, galleries dedicated to photography, photography prizes, ‘The Shpilman Photography Institute’ and many more have instigated in Israel what has long been apparent in the international art world: the golden age of photography. And thus, alongside valuable and bold documentary photography, mainly committed to the representation of grief and sorrow in the ‘Israeli condition’ given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Micha Bar-Am, Pavel Wolberg, Miki Kratsman, Alex Levac, Gaston Itskovich and more), there was also the artistic photography which has begun to flourish, winning recognition and appreciation among the world’s most renowned museums and galleries. Simultaneous with the unprecedented pluralism taking on the post-modern artistic scene in Israel and worldwide, the practice of artistic photography has also reaffirmed a multitude of syntaxes of various artists. Indeed, even if one does not expect to encounter an “Israeli photographic substance“, most of the photographs on view here – the works of ten of Israel’s most important contemporary photographers –ratify a visual tension between trauma and fiction, with sediments of unease concealed in the depth of the artistic effort to convert the realistic into the simulated.

Assaf Shaham’s photograph from 2012, Full Reflection, embodies the syntax of photographic simulation. Shaham, born in 1983, based in Tel Aviv, has won the 2012 Tel Aviv Museum Constantiner photography prize, and exhibited a solo show there that year. A graduate of the Tel-Aviv school for photography ‘Minshar’, and the recipient of the Shpilman Institute for Photography Scholarship for Excelling Photography Student for 2011, Shaham is primarily interested in the very activity of taking photographs and its technical mechanism. The Shpilman prize committee stated that Shaham is “facing foundational concepts from the outset of photography against digital manipulations, revealed in their cumbersome awkwardness”. Shaham himself admits:  “I became interested in what photography can do, […] what is this device, a camera. I started investigating photography and its internal logic, […] get inside the camera and deconstruct it, […] remove all the layers”. This Full Reflection series was created by reciprocal scanning of scanning devices. The anonymous scanner leaves behind only a blinding white light, going on and off, creating Mondrian-like areas of color. In this work, Shaham brings together the peak of modern art with the post-modern desire for simulation, bridging the two with an abstract, conceptual language. Photography, conceived in the 19^th century as a mere assisting tool for art, returns to the art world a victor.