Michal Rovner
Six human shadows ascend a hillside we cannot see, the evenly spaced silhouettes climbing into a swirling tan sky–a group reaching for some lofty goal? Yet the sky is indistinguishable from the ground. Only a darker patch at the far right looks like solid turf.
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Born in Israel in 1957 and now living in New York, Rovner took up photography as a young woman after she and her future husband started a center for photographers in Tel Aviv. Soon she was enlarging and modifying small Polaroids with a copier and in the lab to abstract their forms and magnify the grain; the pixels in many of her current works have the swirling patterns of film emulsion. The “Shayara” series was taken in a desert in Israel; inhabitants of a nearby town were the subjects. Knowing this gives the tan undercoloring an added association of dryness, barrenness.
As critics have suggested, Rov-ner’s work has been shaped by the harshness of Israel’s landscape (many earlier photos were taken in the Dead Sea, her “favorite place on earth”) and the frequent threats to Israel’s existence: Rovner’s childhood was marked by two wars, and her parents’ home was damaged by a Scud missile in the gulf war. In Field strange, squat forms in a two-toned “landscape”–the bottom half of the picture is brown, the upper half blue–seem to grow out of the ground like some weird species of plant. They also suggest human figures–and monumental gravestones. In All That 14 upside-down figures, their arms outstretched, apparently fall through space against a pale lavender field. I immediately thought of a mass suicide leap, which seems a suitable end for these only barely human figures struggling to achieve form out of the near-chaos of pixels. (Appropriately, this image began as a video of people climbing a distant hill–Rovner inverted the image–slowly threading their way across difficult terrain.)
What first struck me was Thall’s omnivorous love of detail. Taking advantage of the large four-by-five-inch negatives’ sharpness, he sets up compositions that give cracks in the sidewalk the same sensuousness as the human form. Though mostly devoid of figures, which would likely blur in the view camera’s long exposure times, his photos are alive: he uses inanimate objects and empty spaces to evoke human presence all the same.
His strangely empty landscapes, which become haunting carriers of human emotion, perhaps have their roots in Thall’s childhood: his father, a professional musician, would sit on the back porch and “paint copies of Edward Hopper paintings as a hobby.” As a result, he says, “I never had any trouble with the idea that a street scene or a facade of a building could be subject matter for art.” I thought of the lone figure under the massive shadow of the el in Chicago, State and Lake Streets, 1981 and of four photos, hung together, in which the faces painted on signs and billboards are the only human images in barren city scenes.
