Longing for home is what unites us. Conflict does too. The dominating narrative in my family is one of exile and return. Our Israeli grand-
parents, orphaned Holocaust survivors, kept their survival details to themselves. My work is to reveal their latent image. I see the built environment as a portrait of the collective psyche and spirit of the culture, its cacophony and sense of impermanence, its trauma, erasure and reinvention. Working in the liminal spaces of the development towns, I reference the generations, occupiers, and wars. Striving for expression of these competing forces leads to ambiguity inherent in my subject, at the intersection of dueling cultural narratives, within an arid, fragile ecosystem.
These photographs are from my exploration of Haredi sects in New York, Benei Barak and Jerusalem. The Hebrew translation for Haredi is literally “one who trembles in awe of the word of God”. Many Haredim fear the outside world as its temptations could jeopardize their forefather’s traditions, which they hold precious. Family life is central to their society with women having as many children as possible. The women see raising children as religious devotion. In their very large families, children help to raise one another as the live their lives according to the laws of the Torah.
This project interrogates the construction of a feminine identity. Drag queens straddle two worlds one of anticipated performance the another of drab reality. Their admission into a dual existence endows them with extraordinary power. Young dancers are being groomed to preform in a make-believe world. Hopes of winning injects their identities with an almighty sense of competition. Strippers play the opposite of make believe. They perform the part of what they actually are, women.
These photographs come out of my relationship with an extended Romani family in Boston. The women especially struggled to provide for their family and adhere to their culture, without it being lost to American assimilation. In these photographs children express the chaos present in family life, the hope, and the hopelessness.