DROR MAAYAN
My is my way of life, my identity, my native tongue.
I am a painter and photographer born and raised in Israel. I exhibit extensively and work with academic, public, and private institutions. I was always intrigued by material art emerging on different surfaces and textures, changing and deteriorating, and eventually dying and disappearing. Naturally, graffiti became a subject of my interest, and I started to document them around the world twenty years ago. In 2011 my photographs of the graffiti on the IsraeliPalestinian separation barrier, taken as a part of an international project, were published as a book, ‘Facing the Wall’ (Walther König, Köln).
For over two and a half decades, I worked with the most advanced digital cameras. Then, several years ago, I discovered alternative photography.
I moved back to 19thcentury photography techniques and was completely captivated by the possibilities they
revealed to me. Recently, I opened the first and only natural light “Victorian” studio in Israel.
Everything about these old photographic techniques is physical and sensible. They involve your total self; to be at one with the world around you, the real material world. To explore matter, textures, human senses, light, and darkness. Endlessly. There is a Sisyphean precision in staging the composition or recognizing it in the field, focusing on every small detail. The smell, the touch, the dirt, and the magical mixture of different chemicals coalesce in a miraculous moment when the image finally emerges.
It is sometimes surprising and powerful because it is not perfect. I shoot with authentic antique wooden cameras, big heavy, pieces of art themselves. These relics come to life again in my studio, echoing their former lives and masters. Through their lenses, past and present, like parallel worlds, merge into a new frames, my frames.
It is not my intention to rekindle 19th-century photographic techniques. They are rather a platform, a starting point.
Icontinue working on the plates, manipulating them by hand, by paint and chemicals, by pen, by a sharp tip.
At times, this creates tension between the original photograph and the artistic touch. They are not reproductions of the real world but integrative pictures built of several layers whose interplay reflects my impression of it.
I work in series, though my subjects vary: from portraits and nudes to landscapes and still life. I do not believe in one beautiful perfect frame. I think the power of each frame's beauty is in its imperfection, its own unique character. It is impossible to achieve two identical copies made by hand. The imperfections are born of the process.
The process of creating these photographs is, for me, the process of life. It is always to explore, to tell a story, to make an intimate discovery.
By merging old into new, blurring the line between photography and painting, converting an antique technique into contemporary and upto-date artistic work, I take my own personal journey by failing or succeeding.