NIW - Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad | Herchkovitz Shows What You Don't See | Review
By Birgitta Tillman
A woman enters a room. There are white sheets over the couch and chair. The woman has a letter in her hand. And that's it. But the closer you look, the picture becomes uncanny. Is the woman, who looks a bit startled, moving? Does she want to tell someone something? Does she actually walk into the room? Or is she about to leave? Photographer Lior Herchkovitz doesn't like to answer questions like these. Exceptionally, he says that for himself the white sheets and the letter symbolize the end of a relationship, for something that is over. He cannot say that he was inspired by this light and staged situation by Vermeer's girl with a letter. But it is quite possible that The Love Letter played a role in his subconscious.
Lior Herchkovitz (Tel Aviv, 1972) has just graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He tries to "Tell real stories in an imaginary world, create tableau photographs by choosing the events, environments or emotions," he says. Herchkovitz wants to take pictures to contemplate, to associate with. In a mix of commercial, autonomous, and fashionable. Layered too. “If all viewers think the same about an image, it is deficient”, he says. The photo of the woman in the white room is titled: Woman with a Letter and is part of a series of six about the relationship between a man and a woman. The six scenarios form a continuum.
For Herchkovitz, photography is about capturing social aspects of life, of relationships between people, according to I. B van Creveld in his recently published book Kunst in Den Haag. His images show real faces in an illusory world. Herchkovitz works in the border area between 'staged photography' and 'realism'. In Kunt in The Hague, there is an intriguing photo that is reminiscent of a dream. A man sits on a single bed in a room, which strangely enough has a farmhouse door, the upper part of which is open. Outside the door is a young blonde woman, wearing a white dress looking into the room. Behind the man is an older lady, probably his mother, sitting by his side and placing her hand on his knee. She seems to support him in the decision he made but is undecided about whether to follow through. Above the bed hangs a portrait painting of the man when he was younger. Behind the bed is a young woman wearing a red dress. The man reaches for a telephone. Is it a moment of hesitation? Does he have to choose between two different relationships or is it simply a moment of taking some responsibility?
Herchkovitz looks for models for his scenes like a film director looks for actors. If desired, he addresses people on the street. "More than often, people I approach think it won't work, but I promise them it will," he says confidently. "I love working with ordinary people because they bring much authenticity," he says. To the comment that his 'ordinary people’ are often extremely slim and handsome, he replies: "Casting often leans on the character I am looking for a specific scenario rather than beauty as we as a society usually perceive”.
A balcony. A man is smoking and holding a mug with a picture of the cartoon cat Garfield. A woman sits in the corner with a baby. Is this the silence after a quarrel that got out of hand, in which the gentleman has been extremely unruly? Is this couple trapped in marriage, with the balcony bars for bars? Or are the parents meditating after a nice meal and is it just an idyllic picture? This photo is part of a series of six documentary-like photos of three couples that Herchkovitz took in the period 1998 – 1999.
For Herchkovitz, all his photographs are a kind of self-portrait. "You enter the domestic life of people you recently met and that raises questions such as: “How does my life look like or what will my life look like later?" Herchkovitz himself finds the photo of the mother with the empty dinner plate rather humorous. "The people who see this picture immediately look at the woman because she is capturing a great portion of the frame. However, the smiling baby looking into the lens reveals the fact that the photographer is closely present."
