From our archives: Interview with Ori Gersht

This interview originally appeared in Musée Magazine’s Issue No. 7 Volume 2 - Energy.

Ori Gersht is an Israeli fine art photographer. Gersht studied Photography, Film and Video at the University of Westminister before graduating with an M.A. in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London. He is represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, CRG Gallery in New York, Mummery + Schnelle Gallery in London, and Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv. Gersht utilizes both video and still photography to create a dialogue between contemporary photography and the history of art, between the present and the past, between imagination and memory. His works allude to tragedies from the Spanish Civil War to the bombing of Hiroshima. His exhibtion History Repeating at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last year featured images drawn from the history of still life violently blown apart.

Your work spans both video and still photography. What interests you about being able to bridge both media?

I see them as being complementary of each other. Each medium allows me to exploit areas that are otherwise limited. My work with photography is very much about a resisting the passage of time; it’s an attempt to hold on to something that is slipping away. Many of my images are happening when I try to capture a moment that is either happening at an extraordinary speed or during a very long exposure; time is leaving its impression on the negative. By doing this, it’s recording and erasing information all the time. It's very possible to hold on to something and fix it in time with photography.

The films are offering something else; in film I can present a much more grounded, multifaceted impression of the passage of time. Recently, I have found that a lot of my films focus on some form of portraiture. I explore the relationship between the history of painting, the history of portraiture, to what it means to make portraits today. The moving image can illustrate with an almost hyper-realistic quality. It can expand and continue: this effervescent thing that we were addressing 500 years ago.

I think moving through the two mediums has to do with certain conceptual and formal questions. These questions dictate the medium that I choose.

I understand the opportunities in both, but what are the challenges that you might find in either one?

I can talk about specific works. For example, the exploding flowers is a very large photograph. In this photograph what interested me was the relationship that existed in technology and the way technology is expanding our perception of reality. I wanted to create a moment that Fontaine Le Fleur from the 19th century could not even comprehend; an idea of exploding the flowers at such a tremendous speed. I photographed the explosion at the speed of seven and a half thousandth of a second. It's a speed that is too fast for the brain to process, but because of technology, a moment like this can be depicted, and become a powerful and conscious reality.

The original Fontaine le Fleur is very modest in scale so it was crucial to blow up my images large enough so as to introduce all the information sufficiently. This expanded the tension between that of Fontaine Le Fleur and my work. By raising questions about, “what is reality?” we begin to ask, “how do I deal with reality?” The camera created its own reality by recording these things.

Read the rest of the interview in Musée Magazine’s Issue No. 7 Volume 2 - Energy.