© Michal Chelbin | Granddaugher, Russia, 2004
Enigma of reality
Michal Chelbin
The portraits of the Strangely Familiar series of Michal Chelbin are aesthetic and enigmatic.
The portraits of the Strangely Familiar series of Michal Chelbin are aesthetic and enigmatic. The beauty of the light, colours, composition, and gazes of the young people invite the spectator to delve into the picture. A deeper investigation reveals an uncanny psychological depth. What do the subjects in the portraits hide? "I want the picture to be very aesthetic. I invite people to look at the picture, asking them to deal with something uneasy inside the frame. It's an aesthetic trap."
Photographic portraits could be divided into psychological, editorial, and documentary portraits. The documentary portraits show individuals but simultaneously tell a story about them being representatives of societal groups. The portraits of Israel-based photographer Michal Chelbin seem to fall in the category of documentary portraits because they talk about particular situations of the sitters. But Chelbin doesn't see her portraits as documentary work, but as psychological investigations. "I don't refer to my work as a documentary. My third book, Sailboats and Swans, was about prisons and prisoners in Russia and Ukraine. I'm not interested in the prison, how the prisoners live or how they are treated per se. My portraits are more about individuals, more about the soul of people. I am looking for universal feelings. I take a lot of portraits of youth. My first book, How To Dance The Waltz, is about performers. Therefore, I made portraits of the individual actors. I concentrate on what they reveal of themselves. I do not show how they live or what their condition is. I am more interested in what it means to grow up as an adolescent. So even though my work might seem documentary, it focuses on the state of mind of the sitters."
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Strangely Familiar
The series, Strangely Familiar, published in the eponymous book, shows young people, primarily performers, in various situations. There is a black-and-white picture of a little boy sitting on a bed with a chimpanzee as his companion. A girl dressed in a blue dance outfit sits with her grandfather on a brown sofa with a tapestry-decorated wall. A sturdy-looking girl in a pink bath suit is leaning against a yellowish Russian car near a park. In one photo, we are confronted with the inquiring gaze of a girl named Alicia, sitting in a turquoise Russian old-timer. The photo posed questions: Where is she going to, or why is she in this car? The pictures all have this strangeness, but how familiar could that be? Freud has the concept of "das Unheimliche", the uncanny, which means strangely familiar. That concept can be used in a lot of Chelbin's work. "I work with a lot of visual contrast. Strangely familiar is an oxymoron: two things that can't exist together, but they are, and this is what I'm looking for in my photography. Some things are not supposed to be together. However, when they are together, they create a mysterious contrast. This contrast can generate depth and tension you might not get otherwise. People have many aspects, especially youngsters, who undergo many changes. They are at the stage of finding out who they are, and this attracts me to people and photograph them."
Strangely familiar is an oxymoron: two things that can't exist together.
Ukraine
Many of the portraits have been shot in Ukraine, which raises the question of why Chelbin chose this in the present-day war-torn country. "My father was born in Ukraine. He and my grandmother survived the Holocaust. As a student, I had a friend from the Russian community. She just moved to Israel. I started documenting her and her sister. So, I suddenly found myself in Russia and Ukraine, and one thing led to another. When I came to Ukraine, I was immediately attracted to this place because something about it made time stand still. You can feel the past even though you are in the present. The contrast between the present and the past is very intriguing. The people are very hospitable, and although they might look tough, they are warm, making it easy for me to relate to them."
Natural light
All the portraits are shot with an analogue camera in a square format using natural ambient light. The colours are soft and have a natural tonal range. This approach gives the photos a timeless and unpolished aspect, drawing the spectator into the deeper meaning behind the people depicted. "I've been working in this way for many years. I believe everything should happen during the shoot and not afterwards. I don't enhance the pictures on the computer. Apart from some basic post-processing, I don't touch the basic image. The depth of the image should already be there, brought in during the shoot."
The depth of the image should already be there, brought in during the shoot.
Enigma
Michal Chelbin combines in her work factual information and the enigma of life. She doesn't think of her images as simple windows to reality. "It's more interesting that an image doesn't give you an answer that you ask more questions instead of getting answers. It's more interesting to create different stories with your imagination when you look at an image. There is no simple answer to what an image tells us."
In the series of the prisoners, Chelbin didn't want to know the crimes of the prisoners before taking the picture. In this way, she could work in an unbiased manner. The enigmas shown in the series lie predominantly in the sometimes alienated or introverted gazes of the young boys and girls. "The sitters would reveal a psychological glimpse of their inner life, as opposed to rendering preconceived ideas about their background."
In this context, Chelbin refers to the famous quote by Diana Arbus: "A picture is a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know." Arbus is a vital inspiration for Chelbin. "It didn't matter from whom she took pictures: celebrities or freaks—people from the periphery of society—they all look completely awkward. They showed the same state of mind." Also, August Sander is Chelbin's major inspiration. "He took many portraits of people dressed in uniforms or formal clothes. In my last monograph, How To Dance The Waltz, I photographed young people in uniforms. The dress creates a kind of theatre, adding to the enigma I am exploring."
Michal Chelbin’s (born in Haifa, Israel, 1974) work has been widely shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her work can be found in many private and public collections, such as: The Metropolitan Museum New York, LACMA, Getty Center LA, Jewish Museum New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Sir Elton John Collection, SF Moma and more. Michal Chelbin is a regular contributor to the world’s leading magazines, such as: The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, BusinessWeek, GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, Le Monde and others.
The book Strangely Familiar has been published by Aperture.
https://www.michalchelbin.com
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