Pavel Wolberg Selected Press

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

Selected Press 2016

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

18/03/2016

Haaretz.Com

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One of Israel's most political photographers turns lens on his two homelands Pavel Wolberg's new exhibition is a homage to the artist’s mother, lending the show a touching, heartfelt dimension. By Galia Yahav |  Mar. 6, 2016 | 3:01 PM

In his new exhibition at the Negev Museum of Art in Be’er Sheva, Pavel Wolberg appears to abandon photographs of the galloping, gargantuan grotesques of Israel’s divided tribes in favor of a quieter tone: introverted, contemplative, comparative. Now, under the title of “Rodina Mat / Motherland,” he is turning his gaze on two moments of birth. One focuses on trips he made to various places in the former Soviet Union, where he was born and from where he immigrated to Israel at age seven. The second gaze homes in on Be’er Sheva, where the family first lived in Israel. Each of the exhibition’s three sections mixes color and black­and­white photographs in a medium format. The first section, a kind of prologue, consists of panoramic shots that were exhibited in Wolberg’s previous show. There are settlers from Havat Maon, clubbers, and two marvelous shots of Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip taken a year apart. The second and main section of the show contains comparative photographs of Tbilisi, Kiev, St. Petersburg and Be’er Sheva. Snow, desert. Wolberg shoots the locations as one who is returning to his childhood vistas in St. Petersburg and to the sites of Be’er Sheva, which he photographed for his first exhibition, in the mid­1990s. Now he views them with the dual gaze of the boy and of the adult who remembers the boy. These are places whose grammar is based on resemblances as well as contradistinctions. The most salient contrast is between “Moskovsky Train Station” and “Be’er Sheva,” two 2015 photographs in each of which a small figure is seen walking through a vast landscape, one snow­covered, the other sand­strewn. The comparative element recurs in other shots, “Wadi al­Na’am” (2015) and “Yamal Peninsula, Siberia” (2010), in both of which vegetation crops up amid the layers of snow or of sand and rocks, creating depth of field and relieving them of their flatness by according them perspective. The photograph from which the exhibition takes its name is situated at the center of the museum space. Wolberg returns to the site to which he was taken in childhood for school ceremonies, “Rodina Mat (motherland),” to document this sculptural monument, which is located at the memorial and burial site for the victims of the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War, and symbolizes the victory of the Soviet Union. Rich internalization Juxtaposed to the exterior shots, vast landscapes and abandoned or neglected urban locales are images of family and friends at home. These are images of rich internalization, whose sources lie both in canonical photographs such as those of Rene Burri (many of the photographs in the exhibition recall works of the Swiss photographer) and in the history of painting. They make extensive use of double framing by means of mirrors but also by means of the technique of a photograph within a photograph, frame within a frame, windows and other reflectors. In “Skype Conversation” (2014), for example, a woman is seen sitting opposite a computer screen in a room, as though conversing with a picture. 
 “Natalia and Nina, Be’er Sheva,” from 2013, portrays Wolberg’s mother and daughter perusing an album of family pictures. Prints are scattered on the table next to them. The girl has picked up one of them and is showing it to the smiling grandmother, as they share the family information. We see the back of the print, an empty white rectangle. The landscapes of the deserts of snow and sand, white and yellow, are frames of barrenness strewn with regime signposts, though in some cases the regime is present by its absence in the form of neglect and shabbiness. The family, in contrast, always in its home, is the hub of life, the innards of existence, the fount of riches. The intergenerational connection is represented vertically, in opposition to the arid, 
 despair­making horizontal plains of nothingness, where all one can do is scurry about like an industrious ant. The third part of the exhibition, situated in a small interior room, consists of photographs from the family album as a domestic installation, including 
 f loral wallpaper and a 3­D printing of a porcelain statuette of Pushkin perched on a stack of encyclopedia volumes. There is also a copy of a mythic character from Soviet popular history – the figure of a revolutionary child who saves the city from the “Whites” – that 
 became a widespread toy. In the center is a large photograph taken by Wolberg’s mother from a window in her home, a landscape of tenements and a streetlamp. Wall shelves hold photographs inserted diagonally into frames. None of them fits; each is simply stuck into a frame without consideration for size. Pavel as a boy dressed up as a soldier. A man in a brimmed hat, a woman wearing a kerchief. Children playing on grass. Women laughing on a sofa. A group of adolescent friends. Planted among these images are a few photographs of a different type, such as the documentation of a birth – a team of physicians wearing surgical masks hold a filthy, screaming newborn above a mass of flesh, namely the mother. Thus does life begin. The current show does not have the finesse, the aggressiveness, the complexity of 
 political photography, nor does it display Wolberg’s black humor; its virtues are those of gentleness, poetry and simplicity. It includes spectacular, perfect frames in which the emphasis is on form and the aesthetic, less on the narrative drama that characterized his previous work. This time Wolberg frees himself completely from the stigma of “photojournalist” that had clung to him and is revealed in the full glory and quality of a classic photographer. We come to the new exhibition with the memory of Wolberg’s previous photographs, in which he showed the Israeli reality as a sharp­toothed bacchanalia, a wild costume carnival and a Gulag­style universe of violence. This renders the images of his own family in moments of intimacy captivating and credible: We know that this “family truth” is in danger, shaky, hanging by a thread because of the political. If until now Wolberg was one of the most political of Israeli photographers, and perhaps among the country’s artists overall, it’s now clear that he is the great artist of alienage. In contrast to many others, he does not return to his childhood haunts in order “to find himself” or “to understand” or some other cliché, but to demonstrate the basic alienation that is imprinted in them. His work thus obeys the tradition of humanistic photography but with a minor deviation, which in some cases is due to excessive, too complete obedience that creates an ironic, reflexive distance. Each frame embodies a consciousness of the world and the human condition, and the landscape too becomes material spilled onto the paper or an ancient foundation on whose stage the human show flits about like a flea circus. In this show, it is precisely familial banality that sharpens Wolberg’s distinctive gaze. He allows us to see where his heart lies, his center. By means of the line that he stretches between his mother, who survived the siege of Leningrad, and his daughter, who visits her grandmother in Be’er Sheva, Wolberg imparts meaning to the two landscapes of alienage and seediness that he shows us. There is no ideology here, no lofty values; only consoling private loves might be able to explain this visual snow­sand oxymoron. In large measure, the exhibition is a homage to the artist’s mother, lending the show a touching, heartfelt dimension. How many artists are capable of making that deep and necessary gesture? Too few.

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Snapshot: Impersonating the enemy - Tal Niv Israel News | Haaretz SUBSCRIBE T O HAARET Z DIGIT AL EDIT IONS ‫הארץ‬

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Snapshot: Impersonating the enemy The dramatization of mourning, as depicted in this brilliant and emotionally blunted shot, permits the practice of dissociation from actual grief. By Tal Niv | Jan. 23, 2014 | 2:32 PM 2

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Pav el Wolberg, Sim ulated Battle, Tzeelim base, winter 2 01 3 .

Looking at this photograph of genius by Pavel Wolberg, I remember he said, “I’ll tell you what I did in the army, but then I’ll have to kill you” – not in a movie but in real life, half-joking, in an apartment in Modi’in. A nice guy from an elite special-ops force. We were innocent then. And I look again at this photograph, in which the history of painting is embedded, without even actually being quoted, and from which emanates a very clear voice, and I think about what he did and about how he wasn’t even close to killing me. Then I ask myself if the soldiers laughed, too. The two in the center. Not the third one, on the left. Or if they saw what Wolberg sees here, or if they ever will.

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For this photograph of genius by Wolberg teaches us

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18/3/2014

Snapshot: Impersonating the enemy - Tal Niv Israel News | Haaretz

something about awareness, about dual understanding, about irony. The thing is that no matter how many times Israel Defense Forces’ training and simulation facilities – sites that always “say” something, infused with “meaning” that’s easy to identify – there is something at work in Wolberg that transforms his frame into more. More interesting. More depth. More than the sum of its parts. That “more” is related to talent, to that “something” that can’t be taught. And also to the fact that Wolberg does not “take an interest” in people, but looks at them impartially. There is a blindness to sentimentality in his gaze. These are people. They are capable of everything. But there is awareness here, too. Awareness by the disguised soldier with arms uplifted of the fact that he is impersonating a lamenting woman. But is he aware that he himself is truly lamenting? Equally visible is the awareness of the disguised soldier on the left, the one peeking out the door. Maybe he is aware that he is not capable of suppressing his laughter at the sight of his buddy’s devoted participation in the charade, or maybe he’s baffled by the rupture in reality, by the simulation. By his exposure to the photographer. This is a “simulated battle” at the Tze’elim base for urban-warfare training, on a winter’s day a couple of months ago. What’s being simulated is the aftermath of an assassination in the midst of a civilian population. Look: The soldier who is playing a corpse is lying, limbs twisted, in the street and is unarmed, while the woman – his wife or his mother or his sister, but surely no mere passerby – is crying. And obviously Wolberg, who knows that a training session in Tze’elim is photograph-able, that it bears high dramatic potential, is clearly dramatizing something. The preconceived ideas, “the mold” of “Arabs” in the army. Still, in his work even a photograph of a situation that speaks for itself, that speaks about the pleasure a person may take in impersonating the enemy, contains something saliently “more.” In the composition, the colors, the angle, the sky. The sky is present in a great many of his photos – in the territories and at simulation training sites, but also in gray, empty cities. Because he truly “captures” the thing itself. Wolberg sees that the person in the disguise is truly crying out to the sky. What’s the purpose of the simulation? To ensure that the senses are blunted, so that real mourning will not prevent the soldiers from continuing. So that grief will be a sight they’ve already “practiced.” The dramatization of mourning permits the practice of dissociation from mourning. But Wolberg captures not only this, because he is not just any photographer. His angle, which bespeaks a certain equanimity, even apathy, brilliantly exposes a meaningful outcry. And exposes, too, the pleasure – jouissance – of identifying with the enemy without being aware of it. That is, the way it’s possible to conceal oneself in a disguise twice: to pretend to be crying, and to cry. And when looking more closely at the colors of the sand and the grayness, at the hands and the mouth – one hears. Music. “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” a hymn of empathy for Mary’s sorrow over the agony of her son. I hear the music of Vivaldi, his version of the piece, the most sublime of all, at its peak, “Lacrimosa.” Again, and I think I’ve met him since Modi’in. That he trained a reserve unit. And there he has children. Too. Obviously.

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I look at the disguised young man, whose outcry is not a mockery, and I know that Wolberg is familiar with Russian Orthodox iconography, and that he is not capable of looking any more at soldiers without looking also at their attitude toward the heavens.

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Snapshot: Impersonating the enemy - Tal Niv Israel News | Haaretz

I recognize that outcry, beneath the red head covering, and think how I was not afraid to leave the apartment and head for the cowards full of false confidence. That I was not afraid then, in Modi’in, of the right thing. TOP SELLER Low Stock | Savage Widetone Seamless Background Paper B&H Photo-Video-Audio Fast Shipping, Lowest Prices, 1000's Reviews, Shop Now the Largest Selection of Phography, Video, Computers from Canon, Nikon, Apple, To get the latest from Haaretz

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2/10/2014

A World Apart: Photographs of Hasidic Communities in Israel by Pavel Wolberg · George Eastman House Rochester

Home » Events » A World Apart: Photographs of Hasidic Communities in Israel by Pavel Wolberg

A World Apart: Photographs of Hasidic Communities in Israel by Pavel Wolberg From February 22, 2014 through May 25, 2014 in South Gallery In 1999, photographer Pavel Wolberg stumbled upon a Hasidic wedding ceremony at an event hall in Israel, where he was living and working as a photojournalist. Stepping through the door, he felt himself transported to another world, one in which revelry and reverence played essential roles. He went on to photograph a number of Hasidic rituals and ceremonies over the next decade, producing vibrant images that suggest the complex dynamic between individual and group identity. Pavel Wolberg was born in Russia and moved with his mother and grandmother to Israel when he was nine. Although not religious himself, Wolberg recalls that as a child he was fascinated by stories of demons and tales of moral consequence. Echoes of this affinity and his appreciation for the pageantry of everyday life are palpable in his work. Yet his photography is also informed by a profound understanding of light and its ability to structure perception. Together, the form and content of his work speak volumes about the significance of imagery in social life. Whether "image" is understood as public persona or

Pav el Wolberg (Russian, b. 1966). Wedding, Sanz Hasidim, Netanya, 2013. Inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Meislin Gallery , New Y ork. © Pav el Wolberg

pictorial construction—or both—it is a fundamental part of how people communicate with each other and with the world around them. Wolberg's work is rich with this perception of imagery, as he documents his experiences with a community that is simultaneously strange and familiar to him. While his maternal grandfather was a Hasidic Jew, his encounters with that community came primarily from walking around his neighborhood and observing their ceremonies. Immersed in the community yet not a part of it, his work inhabits an intermediary space with room for reflection.

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Selected Press 2013

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

Selected Press 2012

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

22/08/2016

Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

 

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art Photographer Pavel Wolberg, now exhibiting his work at Ashdod Art Museum, says photographers are at 'bottom of journalistic pyramid.' Ellie Armon Azoulay |  Apr 23, 2012 2:39 AM

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In his photographs, Pavel Wolberg tries to step back from traditional photojournalism and reportage, from investigative and documentary photography. He also avoids taking a political stance or imposing moral judgments, and instead insists on creating "a photo like a photo," to use his definition. And yet his photographs, one after the other, reveal society in all its bare ugliness. At times, the view arouses pity; at other times momentary revulsion. But somehow, surprisingly, they all manage to elicit the viewer's identification.  

"When I look at Wolberg's series of photographs of Kafr Tofah ­ we assume they were all taken the same day ­ he is the witness I would have liked to have there instead of me," writes Haaretz photographer Alex Levac. "It is the kind of photography that elicits in me thoughts and empathy for both of the families photographed: the woman continuing with her daily routine, continuing to smile even, despite the invading soldier and the terrified family huddling, the little girl pleading.

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

'Hebron Purim,' 2010, from Wohlberg’s photo exhibit 'Dissemblance' at Ashdod Museum of Art.

"But he also elicits empathy of a different sort for the soldier standing in the doorway, the soldier pointing his weapon at the unknown who experiences this absurd situation at a distance of just a few hours from the cafes of Tel Aviv." Levac stresses the equal treatment given to the objects of Wolberg's pictures, both in the photograph's composition and the viewer's eyes. Wolberg's new exhibition, "Dissemblance," now showing at the Ashdod Museum of Art­Monart Center (Moshe Ninio, curator ), is a collection of photographs covering the decade 2002­2012. The exhibition clarifies Wolberg's unique way of working ­ both distant and close ­ that is motivated by a sense of commitment and urgency to be there and document the events but is not in the service of any particular agenda. Wolberg takes an equal, democratic, non­hierarchic, direct look at his subjects, be they Muslim, Christian or Jew, Palestinian or Israeli. It is hard to ignore the loaded exhibition name, "Dissemblance." It relates in part to externally imposed disguises (Palestinian detainees whose eyes are blindfolded ), in part to masquerading by choice (Purim ), and in part to the gray areas in between, such as the bride who is completely covered from top to toe, standing across an all­male audience at her wedding in the Vizhnitz Hasidic sect in Bnei Brak.

 

One of the prominent photographs in the exhibition, also appearing on the catalog cover (designed by Michael Gordon ), is of a Jewish settler wearing a colorful peacock costume attached in a seemingly natural way to his hair and thick beard. He is photographed against the background of Shuhada Street, which in the past served as the location of the lively outdoor market of Arab Hebron. In the catalog, Ninio writes that the photograph was taken after the eviction of the Palestinians from their homes was completed, making the presence

http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/culture/leisure/former­haaretz­photojournalist­rebel­enters­the­world­of­art­1.425917

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

of IDF soldiers unnecessary: "In other words, what is presented to us is a portrait of the new owner standing at the crossroads." "That's a curator's choice," says Wolberg and explains that, for him, everyone is just a figure. "That's my work. I don't photograph people, I photograph figures. Ultra­Orthodox versus secular, Arab versus Jew, demonstrations by this group and that, and you're always in the middle. In the middle of it all you can't photograph people; I've hardly ever photographed people." So what distinguishes one person from another? "The photograph does. The picture does. That's what I was taught," he answers. Ambiguous answers like this are given regularly throughout our conversation. Getting Wolberg to talk is a challenge. His answers are terse, not because he's trying to be evasive but because he doesn't see much point in talking. He does his job. He's aware of varying interpretations of his work, to the fact that he is sometimes seen as political, and at other times as the representative of marginalized people, but he prefers not to commit himself to any one of these views. "I can't control the political reading of my work. I just try to maintain my vision," he says. Exactly ten years have passed since he presented his exhibition "Zero Range (Israel )" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (also curated by Moshe Ninio ), which gained critical praise and made him one of the most important photographers in Israel. "At some point in the future, the emblematic photographs by Pavel Wolberg will become our history. More than ever, Wolberg captures the spirit of the place and time as an artist and documentarian," is what Uzi Tzur wrote in Haaretz at that time.

Former Haaretz photojournalist rebel enters world of art

 

Hassidic Jews in Bnei Brak, 2004  Credit: Pavel Wolberg

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

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In a conversation between Wolberg and Ninio, recorded in the Tel Aviv exhibition catalog, the photographer was consistent when speaking about taking pictures in the occupied territories. He distinguished the Palestinian subjects from the Israeli ones in a way that is almost the opposite of the sympathies apparent in some of his works. "I don't feel close to them. I'm interested in the things I know, and I have no familiarity with the Palestinians," he said. "It is easier for me to take close­ups of soldiers. The army is something I know; there, I understand what I'm photographing ­ I'm not willing to photograph from a place that isn't free. To take close­ups of Palestinians, as some people do, is approaching things from their stance or accepting their stance." Later on in the conversation he added, "Were I less Israeli, perhaps I'd do it." On the other hand, regarding one of his works in which a young Palestinian woman is looking at a soldier with contempt in her eyes and a sneer on her mouth, he said: "To me, she doesn't seem any weaker than the soldier. I think she has the advantage over him; she even feels sorry for him. Now, somehow, I have an easier time understanding the woman than the soldier. I'm supposed to understand him, but I don't get him anymore. And that's not a matter of the occupation. I don't know why I feel less connected to him." Wolberg, 48, was born in Leningrad. An only child, he immigrated to Israel with his grandmother and mother when he was seven years old. The father, who remained in Russia, died about a decade ago. "My mother and grandmother were Zionists," he says. "It was hard for me to leave Leningrad. We took some furniture with us, but left a lot behind." He remembers his formative years in Russia well, and feels that they made him into a photographer and artist. "I had a very developed visual sense. Ever since I was a kid, I've been attracted to pictures. I  

spent a lot of time at the Hermitage Museum, my mother had a collection of art books, and I drew and painted all the time," he recalls. Besides his mother's art books, he remembers an etching of a lioness with arrows in her back in his parents' home. "The image scared me. It represented war," he says. "There was also a picture of a father giving his sons three swords; somehow, that picture also grabbed my imagination." Wolberg is talking about Jacques­Louis

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

David's painting, "The Oath of the Horatii," picturing Horatius enjoining his sons to fight a ritual duel against three members of the Curiatii family. After coming to Israel, the family settled in Be'er Sheva. "I felt as if I'd been uprooted and thrown someplace I didn't want to be. I couldn't understand why there was no wallpaper on the walls, and I hated the light and the sun. I remember closing all the shutters to escape the light and lying on the floor to cool off," he says. Wolberg and his mother attended a Hebrew­language ulpan. The language came easily to him, but while his mother was excited by Israel and wanted to assimilate into the society, he felt detached until high school. The grandmother spoke only Russian until the day she died. He remembers the old Zenith camera his mother, a kindergarten teacher, owned, but his love affair with photography started only many years later: "I wasn't interested in the field until after I was discharged from the army. After the army, I didn't feel like doing anything. When I was 23, I bought a Nikon and took pictures, but nothing came of it," he says. Thanks to a friend who was studying photography, he applied to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, but he was not accepted. Instead he attended Camera Obscura School of Art and moved from Be'er Sheva to Tel Aviv. He got into newspaper photography in 1992 thanks to an ad in Hadashot. He took an assignment that involved providing the illustrations for an article about schools. Afterward, on a whim, he decided to go to Netivot to attend an event held by Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (the Baba Sali, literally "praying father" in Arabic ), a leader of Moroccan Jewry renowned for his ability to work miracles through his prayers. At the event, Wohlberg photographed entertainer Dudu Topaz (who had gained notoriety in 1981 for using a derogatory word about North African Jews ) wearing a jalabiya. He approached the newly­launched Anashim paper with the photo and started working there. Some years later, he joined Haaretz, where he worked until four years ago. At the Tel Aviv Museum exhibition you showed tough photographs taken in explosive situations in the Israeli­Palestinian conflict. The current exhibition is less direct, with humor and a sense of the absurd becoming more central elements.  

"First of all, there is a difference between photographing and advertising. Photographing is like seeing. There are things I wouldn't show today, but then I saw and photographed and submitted the pictures to the newspaper because that was the accepted thing to do. In the 1980s, for example, there were military incidents in Lebanon and people would easily take pictures of dead

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

terrorists. Today the acceptable norms in photography have changed." How do you see yourself ­ as a photojournalist, documentary photographer, or artist? "At first I didn't think about photojournalism, but when I started working in the field it seemed to suit me. Back then, going into the occupied territories gave you a sense of freedom. I felt as if I were going abroad, to the Wild West. I love surprising myself. Newspapers love a climax, when everything's clear. Photojournalism is a direct flash and a flat picture, and that's not my own inclination. But even when I worked in photojournalism, I did what I wanted, and went everywhere based on instinct. Today, everything's much more institutionalized, and photographers are sent out to get this item or that. There is no doubt that the digital era has depreciated the status of the photojournalist. Now, photojournalists are at the bottom of the journalistic pyramid. At best, they are a service provider." As someone who was known as a photojournalist, how do you relate to becoming a part of the art world? "The first time I showed in a one­man exhibition was at the Herzliya Art Museum in 1995. Haim Lusky, who had been one of my teachers, curated the exhibition. It seemed to make more sense than journalism. Since childhood, I understood that pictures were supposed to be in a catalog or a book or on a wall. But I remember my exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, and telling a colleague from the Getty Agency about it. He was really condescending about the whole thing. 'We're photojournalists; we deal with the real world and work in a way that affects people and the definition of art.' Today, when I exhibit, even people from the world of journalism take it seriously." Since 1997, Wolberg has been working with the prestigious Dvir Gallery, and in June it will open a new exhibition of panoramic works from recent years, an important achievement, as he puts it. Two of these works appear in the Ashdod exhibition as a teaser. When still working in photojournalism, Wolberg started to  

photograph using a panoramic analog format. "I started using this format when I started to rebel against photojournalism," he says. "Panoramas are no good for newspapers. On the contrary: newspapers are interested in entering into the heart of what's happening, whereas the panorama takes a huge step back and is interested in how the landscape is shaped and how it is possible to relate to many more things within it."

http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/culture/leisure/former­haaretz­photojournalist­rebel­enters­the­world­of­art­1.425917

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Former Haaretz Photojournalist Rebel Enters the World of Art ­ Haaretz

What is your favorite location, the one you find yourself going back to? "Leningrad, I think. I went back there for the first time in 2006. It was a positive experience. Almost everything has stayed the same. I was born in the center of the city, and I went to see the house where I grew up and the places I'd known. Other than that, the language is important to me, and that's another reason I travel to Russia. I connect better to the people there, I have an easier time drinking with them and talking to them. Here, it's different."

Ellie Armon Azoulay Haaretz Contributor

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7/10

Selected Press 2011

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

22/08/2016

The Hole ­ Haaretz

 

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The Hole

Thousands of photographs of stone-throwing have been taken in the occupied territories, but precisely this photograph, taken from behind, captures the unquantifiable thing, the essence of "the situation" here in its deepest sense. Tal Niv |  Feb 25, 2011 11:33 AM

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Museums are abodes of spirits. Museums need spirits, because without them there is no past. No memory. In the refurbished Israel Museum, the spirits have been preserved and new corridors opened. Its renovation glistens in its simplicity, sincere in its intentions, saturated with its genteel national pride, with its sense of mission, with restraint. The collections seem pleased on their walls, huddled together. A large group of visitors straggles after a guide wearing a black skirt and a kerchief around her neck, the older ones holding metal folding chairs so they can rest in front of the works she will talk about. One can understand the halls, yet still go astray: Israeli collection, modern art, European, period rooms. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a pleasant place. And then, on an inner wall in a side room, you encounter a spirit. The ghost of this photograph.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/the­hole­1.345656

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The Hole ­ Haaretz

"Dir Kadis, 2004", chromogenic print, Israel Museum collection Credit: Pavel Wolberg

Thousands of photographs of stone­throwing have been taken in the occupied territories, but precisely this photograph, taken from behind, captures the unquantifiable thing, the essence of "the situation" here in its deepest sense. Pavel Wolberg is a rare photographer. He has a rare talent. He achieves a rare depth. This is a very cold photograph. A chill of equanimity toward what is depicted wafts from the photograph. No position seems to be taken. No attempt is being made to place a portrait or a face at the center: the composition of the frame clearly works against that. No attempt is being made to illustrate something or to set in motion any discussion for or against what is seen. There is no polarization, in the simplistic sense of the word. Yet the viewer gasps. Because there is a hole in this picture. A stone flies toward the clouds, and below lies something unseen. And looking at that hole, one sees the suffering, the essence of a primal complaint to the sky, to what's there and is not listening, to empty space. It is absolute protest. This is a photograph of women throwing stones; its title is "Dir Kadis, 2004" and it now hangs on a side wall in a side room in the Israel Museum. New acquisitions in photography. Much has been written about the art of Pavel Wolberg. The masterful artist's book published by Dvir Gallery three years ago, with an illuminating introduction by Erez Schweitzer, should be distributed in every school just before a trip to Hebron for ritual purposes. Because Pavel Wolberg captures the meaning of the hold on the territories from a position external to the ideological state apparatuses, but also outside the image's world of pathos. In his work, what there is is what there is, and it's insupportable. Without  

uglifying, without prettifying, without indulging in interplays of the two. Possibly that coldness, and the devouring quality of the situation here, prompted Wolberg to undertake a new project ­ photographing African tribes. As though he decided to go back to

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22/08/2016

The Hole ­ Haaretz

anthropology, to Margaret Mead, to that primordial place where a photograph steals the soul of its subjects. In the museum, a group of bearers of folding chairs will soon leave the archaeology section. They are moving ahead according to the order of things. First Temple, Second Temple, Greeks, Romans, Islam. Those who want to encounter the spirit have to come from the opposite direction, against the current, from the other side of the Israel Museum.

Tal Niv

Haaretz Correspondent

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Selected Press 2008

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

From the catalogue of the 52 Venice Biennale Lindsay Harris Pavel Wolberg "Born in Leningrad in 1966, Pavel Wolberg lives and works in Ramat-Gan, Israel, where he moved with his mother and grandmother in 1973 at the age of nine. He grew up in the southern town of Bee'r-Sheave, which in the 1970s was home to a significant Russian immigrant population. At once a local and a foreigner, Wolberg developed the capacity to view his adopted country both intimately and from a distance, a dual perspective that lends his photographs an air of uncanny realism. Wolberg photographs the daily reality of Israel's unstable social and political situation with rigorous, yet empathetic objectivity. Whether depicting armed soldiers against a dime-store backdrop or a manicured garden, a young girl dressed as a princess on a soldier-lined street, or partygoers silhouetted in the dreamlike glow of a nightclub, his photographs document the peculiar, paradoxical reality of living in a state of constant flux and conflict. The stern yet compassionate frankness of his work derives in part from his photographic training, which straddles the realms of art and photojournalism. Since graduating from Tel Aviv's Camera Obscura School of Art in 1994, Wolberg has photographed for museum exhibitions and for Israeli and European news agencies. In their poignant representation of potent, even unsettling imagery, Wolberg's photographs evoke the gritty drama of traditional photojournalism, such as the black-and-white wartime photographs of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and other members of Magnum. Yet Wolberg's carefully composed images and refined treatment of light belie his artistic sensibility. Significantly, Wolberg works exclusively in color. His ability to translate the quality of light into rich hues and subtle tonalities speaks to hi exceptional proficiency and technical understanding of the medium. Above all, his photographs convey a sensitivity and grace born of vigilant and astute observation." About the photograph Qalqilya (checkpoint), 2002

“[…] Pavel Wolberg: ‘I sat there, by the checkpoint… I didn’t really notice her before. I saw her for the first time through the lens. I focused on her face. The light fell on her. It all coincided… Her face interested me, that vague expression. “[…] In contrast to the sequence of enclosures and delineations constituting this image and the possible meanings embodied in it […] it is entirely focused on the face of the Palestinian, a woman, which violates the stipulations established by all the other photographs; and at the focal point of this focal point – her gaze. The questions that have already surfaced are re-invoked: Is this a gaze 13-16 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,11-14 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,36-5000446 ‫פקס‬,36-3306336 '‫טל‬,36536 ‫תל אביב‬,11 ‫נחום‬ 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

of “essence” that asks for nothing? It is a gaze expecting to be returned, acknowledged? And if acknowledged – then, acknowledged as what? And in any event, what is it that is embedded in the face? […] Does the face convey an unexpected, Christian-like fusion of endless tenderness, compassion on the part of a Muslim woman? Perhaps she just wants to be liked, simply in order to cross? […] Her gaze is firm, the gaze of someone aware of her power, of her honor. She has patience. And then he – Wolberg – incidentally focuses and she enters his frame.” Excerpt from Point-Blank (Israel) - Pavel Wolberg, Photographs of the Recent Time, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 2002.

13-16 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,11-14 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,36-5000446 ‫פקס‬,36-3306336 '‫טל‬,36536 ‫תל אביב‬,11 ‫נחום‬ 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

Selected Press 2007

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

22/08/2016

He saw the light

He saw the light With a successful solo exhibition here and invitations to exhibit in Venice and New York, photojournalist Pavel Wohlberg is finally being recognized for his unique style. Tamar Rotem Feb 15, 2007 12:00 AM Of his absorption difficulties in Israel since his arrival in 1973, photographer Pavel Wohlberg remembers only the blinding light. He does not have much to say about his childhood in Leningrad, or about its continuation in an ugly immigrant housing project in Be'er Sheva. He has no revealing comments about his Russian origin, his family, or the absence of a father in his life. Perhaps he actually does have something to say, but doesn't want to. That's what Pavel Wohlberg is like, unsentimental, not a man of words or of memories. Only that bad, penetrating and invasive light that bothered his eyes when he arrived in the housing project. That he remembers well, and he talks about it. He was eight years old, and all he wanted was to close the shutters and sit in the dark. Perhaps it was the play of light that penetrated through the cracks during his childhood twilight that finally lured him to photography. In Wohlberg's apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood in Ramat Gan hangs a large framed piece displaying three of his photos, one on top of another. All three were taken at night, in various places in the territories and in Jaffa, and at their center is an illuminated and magnetic space. Threads of this hidden light in his imagination return and dramatize dozens of Wohlberg's photographs, from various spheres. Rays of light momentarily illuminate the housing project in Be'er Sheva; women in religious ecstasy, their faces turned toward the light that penetrates from an unseen source in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; a Palestinian woman at a checkpoint, with the stripes of light on her face creating a sense of illumination. "I don't know, I looked for the light," he explains in his introspective manner what attracted his eye in this routine situation of a soldier and a woman at a checkpoint, which appears regularly in news photographs. Wohlberg is a marvelous researcher of light. And he is a unique and not entirely understood photographer who was highly praised when he had a solo exhibition last month at the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv. What hasn't been said about this exhibition? That "Some of its photographs will be etched in Israeli cultural memory" (Smadar Shefi). That "Some day in the future Pavel Wohlberg's masterful photographs will be the chronicles of our times. Wohlberg more than ever catches the soul of the place and the time as an artist and a documenter" (Uzi Zur). The exhibition at the Dvir, with all the compliments it received, along with his invitation to exhibit this June at the Venice Biennale, have marked Wohlberg, a photojournalist and street photographer, as a rising star in the art world. Exhibiting at the Biennale is a great honor for any Israeli artist, and particularly for a photographer. Few Israeli artists have been invited to exhibit there outside the Israeli pavilion. But alongside the favorable reception and the compliments, there are already signs of envy, which perhaps more than anything else testify to his growing status in the local art world. Some try to belittle the fact that he was chosen and to attribute the choice to the political context. Someone active in the field of photography,

http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/he­saw­the­light­1.213149

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for example, said off the record that "Pavel's photography deals first of all with the conflict. That's what they're interested in, in Venice, the merchandise of the tragedy." Wohlberg's uniqueness, which nobody denies, is that he succeeds in creating a different quality in news photography, outside of time and place. Miki Kratsman, a photographer and head of the photography department in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (who exhibited at the Biennale two years ago), one of those who bears no grudge, says that Pavel is "a painter with a camera." "Just as a painter fills a surface, he does in photography. From one end to the other he devotes attention to all the parts, as though the photograph were not flat, as we think. In his photography one can see that he devoted time to every detail in the photo. You can see that in the photo of the wedding (a wedding in the Vishnitz Hasidic community ­ T.R.) or the carpets or the soldiers on the backdrop of the park in Jenin. The presence of the soldier on the backdrop of the painting is so precise, it's as though someone did not seize the moment, but planned it. As though he staged the picture. "Pavel creates something that makes a snapshot look as though he mixed colors on a palette. He's very plastic. It's clear that the colors attract his eye and that he is sensitive to light. He understands light on a level that very few people do. In the photo of the horse, he is saying that when one photographs a horse one is actually photographing the light reflected back by the horse. He is aware of that. There are not many photographers who are aware of that." Kratsman adds that it is an optical illusion that Pavel Wohlberg suddenly appeared out of nowhere. "He simply has excellent timing. There was the exhibition at the Dvir and now the trip to Venice, so he suddenly has presence, but that is only in the media. For about a decade he has been exhibiting works of an astonishing level. But quietly. It's like with Barry Friedlander. Two months from now, everyone will know him, because he'll be the first Israeli photographer to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and they'll write about him in the paper. He's been around for a long time. To say that he has now had a breakthrough is an optical illusion to which we, the press and the media, contribute." He was born in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) in 1966. He sums up the sharp transition to Be'er Sheva laconically: "It was a trauma." He grew up in a house of women. His father, who remained in Russia and whom Pavel recalls only vaguely, died over 10 years ago. In Israel his mother worked as a kindergarten teacher. His grandmother stayed at home and cooked the meals. After school he would spend his time mainly in the street. Below the house, he says, stood frightening characters covered with tattoos, criminals, drug addicts and drunks. Gangs of different ethnic groups of whom one had to be careful. He was one of the good boys, who went to school and afterward to the army. If Wohlberg sees himself as an artist, he says it's because his roots are classical and "my mother put it into my head that art is important." In Russia he was exposed to museums and the ballet. He read good literature, Pushkin and Lermontov in Russian, but the art books attracted his eyes and his heart much more. In school he sat in one of the back benches and doodled in his notebooks, "I didn't really do anything else." Although unlike today, during his time young Russian immigrants did not stick to speaking Russian, he does not feel that he has become involved in Israeli culture, and he still identifies more with Russian culture and admires it more. This foreignness is definitely expressed in the photos as well. He admits that he has a foreign perspective, external to the situation, causing him to look at it askance, as in the photograph of the http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/he­saw­the­light­1.213149

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He saw the light

man, the spoons and the goats. "I'm full of criticism of the way the world is constructed," he says. "I can't look at the world and say: that's how it should be. That's good. I like to see things that are not right and to show them." After the army, in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, he arrived in Tel Aviv determined to study photography. He was not accepted to Bezalel, so he registered for the Camera Obscura School of Art. "At first it was 'wow,' to be in Tel Aviv. It gave you an illusion of being in a big city. Of studying art. I would drink at night and get up late, paint. A Bohemian. But that ended very soon. I didn't really learn there. Except for Moshe Ninio, who really taught and influenced me." After his studies he did manual labor, worked as a handyman, cleaned, anything that came up. For a while he worked as a stagehand at the Be'er Sheva Theater, and then as a security guard on fuel trucks entering Gaza. He photographed without anyone telling him what to photograph, and painted as well. The photos were "more personal," as he puts it, like the paintings. Some of them were displayed at an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, and they show people with the sea in the background, or housing projects in Be'er Sheva where his mother is still living. For six years he worked in the news department of Haaretz and since then he has been working with the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), which provides photography services to newspapers the world over. He has been exhibiting for about a decade at group exhibitions in galleries and museums, and has won prizes and stipends in Israel and abroad. In 2002 he had a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art called "Point Blank," which was curated by his teacher from the Camera Obscura days, Moshe Ninio. In 2006, one of his photographs won the photojournalism competition "Local Testimony." In the photo one sees a man fleeing as a car blows up behind him. It happened in Kiryat Shmona during the second Lebanon War. Yossi Nahmias, the curator of the competition, says that one can be cynical and say that if someone shoots a picture for a newspaper and afterward the photo is in a gallery, people will always find an excuse for why it's artistic. For years in countries like Britain, France and the United States, the divisions between art photography on the one hand, and news or any commissioned photo on the other, are not as sharp as in Israel, Nahmias notes. And even in Israel, he says, the division is gradually becoming blurred. "There is greater openness toward bringing together works created in the media as art." If often the press is interested mainly in creating an image that will attract attention and deliver a message that is decipherable rather than enigmatic, Wohlberg "is willing not to be decipherable too quickly, and that is evident in the object of his interest, in his sensitivity and in his willingness to pay a price for it," Nahmias says. Micha Bar­Am, an Israel Prize laureate in photography, thinks that Wohlberg "crosses the boundaries between news and artistic photography and also combines them with each other. "I think Pavel Wohlberg is one of the best things that has happened to photography in Israel in recent years. His work is neither naive nor overly clever, it is intuitive rather than opinionated, and he succeeds in demonstrating that news photography can become iconic photography. That the photographic phenomenon deals not only with reporting, but also creates images." Like Kratsman, Bar­Am also believes that Wohlberg's timing is perfect. "In recent months," he says, "fascinating things have happened in terms of the museums' acceptance of what is called 'documentary http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/he­saw­the­light­1.213149

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photography' ­ a term that I abhor ­ because they've understood that there is power in these photos, as in those of Pavel. And fortunately, like photography that takes place at the right moment, he was born into this situation that has ripened to accept him. It's as though he seized the moment in history of gradual acceptance of photography, and it's fascinating. "I'm pleased about it because he creates in the field with direct methods. He understands that life is sufficiently dramatic and theatrical and he has the proper combination of the laws of the chase and knowledge, in making a visual and artistic statement," Bar­Am concludes. The display of the photos at the Dvir exhibition in a large format of 1.5 x 1 meters moved Wohlberg up, in commercial terms. According to art industry assessments, he doubled his commercial value, and the works displayed cost several thousand dollars each. This exhibition is also much less callous and rough than the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, which was mounted at the height of the second intifada. For me, a trip together to Umm Al­Fahm in 2000 to report on a science high school for Muslim girls exemplified Wohlberg's hunting instincts. He is a giant of a man who is somewhat awkward. There is something wooden in his conduct, until his eye catches his photo and then in a moment he changes. His entire body. On the long trip from Tel Aviv we were silent on all kinds of subjects. It was hard to get him to talk, to get him to relate. When we reached the edges of the Arab community he became alert, and his vitality returned. As we ascended the twisting alleyways, he leaned half his body out of the window and kept on taking pictures. That week the newspaper published a beautiful photo of girls with their heads covered walking through passages filled with light as though there was a kind of halo above them. As opposed to the image of Pavel the fighter on the roads, which he nurtured during the years he worked for Haaretz, galloping to the territories on his huge motorcycle, today he lives a quiet life in Ramat Gan with his partner Osnat, who does psychological research. The couple has a four­year­old son, Amir. At an age where one tends to make depressing summations, Wohlberg can permit himself to feel that he is on the threshold of a great and exciting period. But Wohlberg, who always looks as though all the prizes and the exhibitions have come as a surprise to him, does not yet feel this success. "Once I would have said that in another 10 years you'll do this or that. Now I feel that I don't have another 10 years," he says. He describes his life as a press photographer as an incessant chase. "It's exhausting," he complains. It is more and more difficult to catch the unique photographic image the more "the whole business of photography develops," and the possibilities of photography are greater: video cameras, cell phones, police vans. "There are endless images everywhere. The easier it is, the more difficult to photograph something. There are years of press photography, there's a photography service on the Internet. You see pictures, images, all the time. Once it was easier." For someone like Wohlberg, who is used to getting the story in an unusual way, more and more places have become closed to him, mediated by public relations people and spokesmen. "There are areas that are dead in terms of photography. France, for example. Because it's so familiar. Because you can't simply take out a camera and photograph people. They can sue you. There's no life there," he says. Is Israel, a victim of the conflict, actually a photographer's paradise in that sense? Wohlberg complains that even in Israel people have become much more paranoid and also much more aware of photography, and when their look reveals awareness, that "pollutes the situation" and invalidates http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/he­saw­the­light­1.213149

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He saw the light

the photo in his eyes. Perhaps that is why he did not photograph the settlers much from close up, although he has been taking pictures in the territories since becoming a photographer, and of course took pictures during the disengagement. He has loads of close­ups of Palestinians. That is not because he is a political photographer. "What is a political photographer? I don't represent any side and am not planning to bring down a government. The Palestinians bring their own truth. And the settlers are too aware."

http://www.haaretz.com/israel­news/he­saw­the­light­1.213149

5/5

Silence Always Reigns Around the Storm / Uzi Zur (Ha’aretz, January 19, 2007) Pavel Wolberg, Photographs, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv In the future Pavel Wolberg’s masterpieces will be our chronicles. Wolberg captures the soul of the time and place as an artist and documentarian, and is nourished by both these entities: the instinct of the hunter, so present for the photojournalist, and the artist’s depth and eternity. The border between the two evades us, as they mix so rightfully and naturally in his work. They have intrinsic tension, and the artistic is not fixed and academic, but fluid and sensitive. There is always a great silence around the storm, much stronger than any shout. The photograph rises above the thematic anecdote, and allows the great politics and the humane to rub against each other and create real elation. This country is still a gold mine for this sort of photographs. The exhibition at the gallery – the large prints, the right hanging of the photographs – allows us to linger and examine each and every one of them. The complexity of the compositions, devoid of formulas, changing from photograph to photograph, needs to be examined. For example, the photograph on the invitation card for the exhibition “Nablus 2002”, which seems like a set for an Italian opera: an urban landscape opening and enclosing theatrically. In the depth of the photograph a wide stairway rises or descends to the plane where the action takes place, linking the two groups of houses on both sides of the “stage”. A large family stands, and on the other side, a lone armed soldier sits on a chair. They all look directly at the camera, like a group portrait, and the tension between the composition and the theme is marvelous. In “Jerusalem 2002” the complexity of the composition is once again challenging, between the oh-so-near and far, the low and high, the tension between the walls of stone and the blocked sky, and the way in which the heroines are assembled. The first to capture the eye is the steaming gaze of the masked person, so close and so sculptural that he seems as if he is about to stray off the photograph. Behind him are other people with masked faces, in different distances and heights, on the walls of the mosque and the barbed-wire fences. This is a scene of anticipation, charged with much tension, about to be discharged. But maybe the most compelling photograph is “Hebron 2002”, surging onto photographic eternity. A mustached man in a black suit, his hands tied behind his back and his eyes covered with a piece of flowery cloth, kneels at one end of the photograph, on the margin of a dusty road crushed by the chains of the tank parking in the back. He is the center of the composition, and his concealed eyes gaze at us and the white sheep, looking at him. The light is sweet and incredibly soft, illuminating the angles of this triangle of unequal forces. “Jenin 2003” is a wondrous and enigmatic photograph, seeming at first to be a montage: two soldiers in full gear pass rapidly through a symmetric French garden, and their motion is blurred in this background. What do they do in the classic French garden? Only from up-close one realizes that this is wallpaper. On the other hand, in “Kiryat Shmona 2006” a car is on fire, its glasses shattered, and a man in a bathing suit escapes the yard, concealed by fire and smoke. The photograph captures the zenith of action, and still has unexpected stillness, that of eternity. In the shade of “Orchard in Turmus 2006” a group of soldiers create a circle of half-naked bodies in

the dry summer grass offering them a soft and warm bed of straw, and they massage each other’s back. Here Wolberg is reminiscent of the photographer Adi Nes, in his penetration into a place of semi-erotic male bonding. But Adi Nes’ arrangement and production are not evident here, simply a moment of relief from the battles, of unexpected sensuality and closeness, captured in the lense of a genius photographer who sees the strength of this human circle and the nature providing its background. The hanging confronts the body of the fragile man escaping with the calm bodies of the resting soldiers. An interval from the occupation and battlefields leads us to the mass wedding in “Bnei Brak 2006”, the wedding of the grandchildren of the rabbis of the Vishnitz and Satmor communities. This is like one of Velazquez’s court paintings in its complex arrangement, the heroines in the space that is both vast and shut at the same time – or like Rembrandt’s “Jewish Bride”, in the texture and quality of light. In the front stands the father of the bride; with his back to us he is like a silhouette giving scale and depth for the whole photograph. In front of him the bride, beyond them boys on the one side and girls on the other, and in the back a massive sea of women and men, each of them a whole world in himself. Then we move on to Tbilisi in “Georgia 2004”: on the left a building of red bricks set with pieces of rock, above which a futuristic security man looks suspiciously at an unseen horizon – but the horizon is an immense carpet of rugs hanging in the air. The contrast between the bricks and rugs generates an incredible montage created by reality. And back here, to “Baqa El-Garbieh 2003”, to the Separation Wall in its center, filling the whole frame, where nature has already sunk its teeth. In front of it a boy swinging like a bird from a rope whose source is unseen, taking pleasure, as if the wall has been the one reality into which he was born, the playground of his childhood. One could discuss the banality of the ongoing occupation, becoming a lyrical poem of protest in Wolberg’s photographs, and the necessity of temporary withdrawals into other worlds, intense and poetic. But the strength of his photography detaches Wolberg from the discourse about the death of photography or its revival.

Selected Press 2006

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com

In Threes Terrorist attacks? Settlements? Crime scenes? Press photographer Pavel Wolberg has been there, behind the camera. But this is all work. For his artistic interest he selects the best photographs, prints them in trios, and exhibits them in art museums

Yonatan Amir [From: Ha'Ir: Culture, 10 March 2006, p. 68 (Hebrew)]

"Some photographs printed in the press have become icons," begins photographer Pavel Wolberg. "You may say that this is any press photographer's goal, to produce an icon. But I am not actually sure I have such a goal. Photographers must decide whether to look for icons or work in a more personal manner, and I am in the middle – I do both. While taking photographs, I work in automated mode, trying to take as much as possible. Then in the editing phase, I have the opportunity to do something else, to break things up."

A Matter of Luck Wolberg has been working as a press photographer for almost ten yeas: first at Haaretz, and subsequently in the photo agency EPA. He is a big man with a heavy motorcycle, who "looks like a 'Yasamnik' (member of an elite police unit)," he says of himself. Calm and battle-weary, he sits in a café giving short, direct answers in a husky voice and quick speech: "It's more convenient," he replies to my question about the transition from film to digital cameras; "not really," he says when asked whether the harsh scenes he shoots stay with him after work hours.

Wolberg was born in Leningrad in 1966 ("But I'm 39. Don't you write '40-year old'.") When he was eight, his family immigrated to Israel. He currently resides in

Ramat Gan with his 3-year old son. He arrived at photography studies, even though as a child he was drawn to painting: "After the army I sought a profession. There was nothing to do with painting. Photography seemed like an interesting field that would also give me work. I didn't think I would become an artist or the like."

And art is not a profession? "I am of Russian origin, and my mother taught me that art is a profession, but it doesn't exist here. In Israel art is not really a discipline. You cannot make a living selling paintings. At best you'll get a teacher's salary at Bezalel."

Concurrent with his journalistic work, unlike other press photographers, Wolberg is represented by an art gallery (Dvir) and his works are featured in numerous exhibitions. Some of them can be viewed these days at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (upon receiving the Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist) and at Haifa Museum of Art (in the exhibition "Mixed Emotions"). In both venues he presents photographic trios, printed and framed together. "The ability to edit and determine combinations adds interest," Wolberg explains the mode of display. "When you shoot, you get all kinds of things, some are interesting, others aren't. If you view one picture after the other, it is hard to tell that one is better or more unusual than others. The photographs they select and print in the paper are not necessarily the ones I like. In the combinations I make in the exhibitions I have a choice, and I know what's best. After all, what is there to learn in photography? Nothing. You learn the technique quickly, and then you either see pictures or you don't, you are either lucky or not. All the photographers practically go to the same

places. One day I do better, and another day someone else does. So what is left in the end? Only the editing."

Why trios? "To tell you the truth, it's not that I think this is the best format. It is simply convenient to work this way. Besides," he adds with a smile, "when you are an artist, curators come to you and check how your work will fit into their exhibition. This way I make it more interesting for them."

Photography is a job for Wolberg, and when there is no work, he stays home. "Why should I go out?" he asks. "I take enough photographs as it is. If the agency wants a story, I make a story. Otherwise, I sit at home, drink another cup of coffee."

And if you don't take photographs for several days? "Then I already miss it. You get addicted to it, to the adrenalin. After you shoot a good story you always think how you could have done it better, and then you cannot wait for the next time."

Four years ago Wolberg presented a solo exhibition entitled "Point Blank: Photographs of the Recent Time" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Naturally, it included many photographs of terrorist attacks and views of the Intifada. In a conversation with him in the exhibition catalogue Wolberg said that as a photographer he identifies more with the Israeli side. When I mention this assertion he wishes to correct the impression: "It is not accurate. I said that I know the Israeli side better, that I feel it. But today it is no longer true. Hours of

standing at checkpoints make you realize what is happening on the other side. The more you work, the less you identify with your own side."

How much longer? Doesn't your sensitivity lose its sharpness over the years? "Yes, it does. There is burnout everywhere. When I went to take pictures elsewhere, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, for example, it was more interesting. Here you take pictures of settlers and settlements time and again – how long can you keep it up? So yes, photographers do burn out. On the other hand, you may say that as time goes by, I become a better photographer, and that even here, the themes change. When I started taking photographs for the paper, in the late 1990s, they were looking for material on every little criminal quarrel and every drain pipe that exploded. Then the Intifada broke out and these concerns no longer made the headlines. It was a harsh time with terrorist attacks, we constantly waited for a call. Now it's quieter, except in the settlements."

Are you not afraid to photograph conflicts? "A little. But what are conflicts? Nothing serious. At worst, you shoot and someone aims an egg at you. A friend of mine got his tires slashed. Not the end of the world. Uriel Sinai, a friend of mine, was actually hit by a stone. In the settlements they don't like the press, especially the Israeli press. They think they are being presented in a bad light.

Do you agree with that?

"What is bad? What is good? Do you know any good people? No. So what do you want? It is all about interests. In Ukraine, the orange suited the press, so they were liked. So what? Ultimately the orange were just as corrupt as the blue. Here too, I no longer believe that there is such a thing as 'journalistic documentation'. Each one sees things from his own perspective. There is no right or wrong."

Could there be a situation when you toss your camera to help someone who is in your frame? "You mean, resuscitate people? I think so, although I never actually found myself in such a situation. I won't toss the camera, but I will help."

Even at the price of a good shot? "You can photograph and help. It only takes a second to take a picture. It won't make much of a difference."

Despite his thug-like appearance and body size, there are places which Wolberg prefers to avoid. Areas of crime and clan feuds, he says, are much more dangerous than the Occupied Territories. It is not as dangerous in the Territories, unless you "desperately seek risks." "Today, when I work for an agency," he explains, "I don't have to go into the most dangerous places. At the agency I prepare the story I was asked to make, and that's it. It's not like working in the paper. There is no permanent standby, tasks, ass covering. All in all it is convenient to work here, in Israel. It's not a jungle. You go to Jerusalem to make a story, you have pubs, cafés. Everything is cool. And if you have to go in, within an hour and a half you are already in Gaza, taking pictures."

Selected Press 2002

41-41 :‫ שבת‬,‫ שישי‬,44-44 :'‫ה‬-'‫ ג‬,1111441-11 ‫פקס‬,2111111-11 '‫טל‬,2411116 ‫ תל אביב‬, 11144 .‫ד‬.‫ ת‬,41 ‫ראשית חכמה‬ 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893, [email protected], www.dvirgallery.com