Elad Horenstein

A cultural footprint in the Back Yard

The photographs presented here were selected from a collection I have created over a period of meandering throughout the Kiriat HaYovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. They are an intermediate product of contemporary dreaming while looking at cultural footprints that lead me to the backyards of the Israeli society. Thus wandering is cyclical, in enclaves and yards into which I am ejected. I walk on a path that is some kind of self- surveillance, where I retrace my footsteps and search for surface changes in the neighborhood’s microcosm. Through the lingering gaze and the story- telling that the surveillance accumulates, the marginal and the negligible become the subjects of the photograph. Helped by light, I freeze an ordinary moment, and it is revealed in bright contrast. My personal experience of the world is mediated by the marginal places and through the camera’s lens; mystery overshadows reality and the soul escapes to the imagination. The free rambling allows me to see systems and orders which are beyond the pale of what is ordinary and familiar, while exposing social and cultural gaps. The photographs point to the disappearance of the original function of something in the present and the continuation of its existence in different arrays, such as processes of building and conservation, or in community bodies. The cultural-social situation that shifts between change and conservation bubbles up through a deep, repeating examination which looks for similarities, for the unconscious expression and the uncovering of the margins.