In his very first monograph, Israeli-born artist Elad Lassry juxtaposes a selection of photographs, photocollages and film stills as survey of his artistic practice. I can recall an interview in which Lassry described an interest in making photographs that have “no home,” a concept he explores by attempting to create works that are somehow void of authorship or index. In the vein of his contemporaries Christopher Williams, Roe Ethridge and Torbjørn Rødland, his photographs are at once extraordinarily brilliant and blatantly familiar, or as Beatrix Ruf puts it in the book’s introduction, both “seductive and irritating.”
Perhaps most immediately interesting for those who are new to Lassry’s work is that his photographs are reproduced in the pages of the book as if they are objects hung on a gallery wall. Each picture is complete with a uniquely painted color frame, often a nearly exact match of a prominent hue within the image. This deliberate statement draws attention to the plasticity and artificiality of photography itself, something that Lassry clearly delights in.
Inside of the frame, we find a slew of seemingly disconnected subjects – animals, cosmetics, fruits and vegetables, actors, models, and so on – some staged by Lassry in his studio and others re-appropriated from picture magazines and film archives, sometimes reworked or overlaid with other negatives. He mingles still lifes, studio portraits and abstract experimentations to create a pop-artsy hyper-commercial postmodern language that is indeed something all its own.
There are the books that sing, and then there are the ones that just sort of hum along. Perhaps this is the separation between those that are necessarily books and those that serve simply to catalog the works of art. As playful and multifaceted as Lassry’s photographic work is, I will admit I hoped for more of a reflection of this in the publication itself. Nonetheless, there is much to marvel at on the pages. Whether struck with intrigue or indifference, the pervasive dualities in the work of Elad Lassry keep us looking further.
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Originally published in Photo-eye Magazine, October 10, 2011.
Elad Lassry can be purchased here.
2 Comments
December 2, 2011 – 1:15 am
I saw Elad’s work at MOMA and somewhere in Chelsea last winter. I found the work to be mildly more interesting than Roe Etheridge. Yet this ad hoc school of photograph doesn’t live up to Wolfgang Tillman’s work which operates on multiple levels as least (I’m not a huge fan of his work but get it and you know, like it). I feel like there’s some weird milieu think that allows this work to proliferate. Perhaps it mirrors the randomness of photography within lifestyle magazines and web sites, ADHD images for that yuppified qua indie qua arty sort of world. Whatever it is it ain’t good and I’m surprised that you think we’ll keep looking further. Perhaps it’s political to “like” this (a facebook term that perfectly expresses the degraded sense of judgement today).
I bet you’ll find a lot more to see in Dean’s Floh, which is an intelligence organizing true randomness, than this sort of low brow “whatever” that passes for photography today. Or perhaps seek something that has better photographic qualities than vague conceptual whatsis.
December 18, 2011 – 12:17 am
I enjoy the photographs. I like how the photographer uses different objects to create a scene and I like the colors that are used.