Publications

"Tel Aviv" Newspaper, 1995
Photography
By Taly Cohen-Garbuz
The non concrete Ramla

"The camera in this work has an important role: It is grasped in our consciousness as an appliance, which presents the truth. When I use this appliance, captured as a documenter, and I distort its so called vision, I create different evidence to my experience of reality. The use of the camera still hypnotizes me. The possibility to transform light energy into material still seems like magic to me. I love taking pictures. Whatever I see through my eyes, I need to preserve the image in my mind. Although we're not Indians, by the act of taking a picture, in some mystic way, I feel  I've taken what I saw and it stays with me".

Photography
"HA'ir, Tel Aviv" 24.2.1995
Loaded sign
Baruch Blich

Yoram Vidal, Photographs 1993-94
Camera Obscura
Curator: Vered Mimon

Yoram Vidal's photography fits all photography theories written in the second half of the century, inspired by Walter Benjamin's writings. He has perpetuation, point of view, controlled realism, and mainly – soliciting and seducing to see more and more. Vidal sketches his memories through his photographs, and so we don't get it wrong, he treats the lenses so that the images seen would be grasped as distant, a bit obscure, as if taken from a dream. You should see Vidal with careful attention, not only due to his very personal messages, but mainly because of his attempt to erase the standard memory usually presented in a photo album, under a frame or on the wall.
His photographs focus upon allegedly simple landscapes – a staircase, trees, an open field, no human beings, and no identification of a certain location. In all photographs there is a nostalgic longing for something delicate that stands out, which in fact is ugly, secular, hard and unclear. The search for lost time within Vidal's work is not finite. In vain would you look within the exhibition for a different focus. Every work has its own focus, and the observer passes from one work to another, without sequence, as normally expected from nostalgic photography. In Vidal's works there is no development: His photographs lack a plot. Every work in the exhibition stands for itself, and in every one of them Vidal starts and finishes a whole story.  The stories are seemingly simple, but once you read them over and over again and  let those details penetrate your field of vision, you get to see photography, in which every detail  is a loaded sign, filled with excitement, connotation, and much more. It is not easy to observe Vidal's works, despite the fact that they are very aesthetic. There is unlimited importunity and obsession mixed with a bit of self compassion, which is what makes him so interesting………..

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