Ori Gersht

In his still life series Gersht investigated the relationships between photography, technology and optical perception, at a pivotal moment in the history of photography where digital technology both threatens a crisis and promises a breakthrough. Research into the early history of the medium of photography is brought together with theoretical discourse, creating, still image and films that (literally) explode the genre of still life, the beautiful and destructive results captured using cutting-edge technology. In "Pomegranate", a film that references Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 17th-century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion and obliterates a suspended pomegranate fruit, bursting it open and wheeling it slowly into the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying seeds. A peaceful image is transformed into bloodshed, and a dialogue is established between stillness and motion, peace and violence.

Gersht’s photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny and chance. Allusions to the catastrophic violence of the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the suicide bombs that Gersht anticipated during his childhood in Israel can all be found in this work. As such, it reminds us of our past, present, and future, and, above all, the fragility of life itself.

Gersht engages the themes of life, death, violence, and beauty. His photographs and films transcribe images of sites of historical significance—the Judean Desert, Sarajevo, Auschwitz, the Galicia region of Ukraine, the Lister Route in the Pyrenees (on which Walter Benjamin made his ill-fated exodus from Nazi-occupied France)—into ciphers of psychological disruption. Such scenes may not seem out of the ordinary unto themselves, but, through the artist’s focused attention and treatment they evoke the emotional resonance of what has transpired—most often, violence, and, more significantly, the ghosts of war’s most egregious detritus, its refugees. Pervasive in Gersht’s work is the landscape, as a place, an idea, and an art historical trope. His films and photographs may be compared to paintings in their display—from their unhindered access (no Plexiglas separates their surfaces from the viewer) to the frames surrounding the monitors on which the films often play. Moreover, the vistas and horizons of, for instance, "Between Places" (1998–2000), "White Noise" (1999–2000), "The Clearing/Liquidation" (2005), and "Evaders" (2009), recall Romantic depictions of the sublime. They conjure precedents in both photography, such as the vistas of Andreas Gursky and the landscapes of the American South by Sally Mann, and painting, by J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and even Mark Rothko.

Gersht has exhibited widely in museums and galleries since the early 1990s. He is represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, CRG Gallery in New York, Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, and Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2012, Gersht's show History Repeating was mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Ori Gersht (born 1967) is an Israeli fine art photographer. He is a professor of photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent, England.