Einat Greenberger

Untitled

I photograph my mother’s body; she was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. Since the diagnosis, the home I had grown up in and the people in it changed, as had their roles and the way they perform their daily routines. I started documenting my mother when she was initially diagnosed with the illness, in the first year of my studies at Bezalel, to understand better the dramatic changes in her body and my immediate surroundings. Focusing on my mother’s changing body allowed me a new kind of looking, which would have been impossible without the camera’s mediation. The camera lets me to direct my gaze at the sick body, a gaze that generates many thoughts and questions about the utterly familiar that has suddenly become ‘other,’ unknown, almost alien. That was why I chose well-known Israeli landscapes, related to the family’s biography, for the photographs: agricultural scenes and the buildings of the kibbutz. At the center is the enigmatic figure, neither male nor female, neither old nor young. The photographs reveal ambivalent processes of decline and growth, intimacy and distance, curiosity and empathy—all these confronting the desire to disconnect, to look away.