Ilit Azoulay

Azoulay received a classical training in photography, but ever since she completed her MFA she has critically confronted the norms of photography imposed by a paradigm, developed in a male-dominated industry, that the medium should capture a decisive moment. On the one hand her post-produced images inscribe the photographic process in duration, while on the other it alters the photographic perspective induced by the use of a single lens. Azoulay is best known for pioneering a photography technique aimed at recomposing an image according to the data issued from a thorough research process.

Her work, Room #8 (2011) is a single post-produced ten-meter long panorama and is composed of thousands of digitally assembled macro photographs. It is no longer possible to assess the position or temporality of the photographer for she vanishes behind the grid.

“.... the grid has become iconic of this tense. It is not the grid of modernism, presented as an image of utopian and autarkic autonomy; nor that of postmodernism, reproduced as both a model and a product of ceaseless mechanical movement; nor that of architecture, structured in scaffolding form; it is not even the common, trivial grid habitually used to instill order. No, for Azoulay’s grid lends itself to communication with any and all of these grids, only so long as it remains utterly committed to the establishment of foreignness and distance between the images of these objects and whoever faces them.”

Perhaps more in affinity with “female” weave craft, Azoulay addresses and critiques the Darwinist notion of progress that undergirds the technicity of photography. She often refers to “the one man in the first daguerreotype who was unknowingly photographed, not only because he did not know Daguerre was pointing his machine at him but simply because the technology was not part of his understanding of the world yet: Daguerre was invisible while gathering information.”

Obviously, today it is hard to find a person who is unaware of the camera’s eye and places that aren’t under its scrutiny. But if we look again at this daguerreotype, it appears that the others, those strolling on the Boulevard du Temple at a normal pace were left out of the image, for their pace was too quick for the chemical solution to record their figure.

“It is precisely who did not make it to the visual realm of immediacy dictated by the technical progress that interest me: ‘undeveloped silver halides’ dwelling in the darkness of the past, under layers of time, years of oblivion. Non-processed data of which the story can only be recovered piece by piece.”

With the help of researchers and witnesses, her work is developed on a textuality functioning as data. Rather than critically addressing the administration of data and its unchallenged technological rendering of images, she often proposes other strategies of data gathering and image rendering. A good example of her exhibition strategy can be found in Shifting Degrees Of Certainty, 2014 that was shown at MoMA’s exhibition, Ocean of Images in 2015. Photographic fragments carefully organized on the wall of the museum each bear a number that when pressed in the provided audio-guide, delivered a story about the particular fragment and how it came about. The viewer was ushered into 85 different stories offering as many paths as the artist traced during her research.

“It does not create objects but rather discloses HOW an object has come about and shows why and how this disclosure gives itself as art. Searching for its objects and researching without end the non-appearing sources of their occurrence, the “double law” of this method invents a wholly other SPHERE where the objects and their histories happen WITHOUT method. As if objects and their histories were happening outside, before and beyond any and all space-time coordinates. As if thus objects and their histories required other performatives irreducible to the spatio-temporal synchronicity and, cast outside this synchronicity, they, the objects and their histories, finally reveal themselves WITHOUT END.”

In Azoulay’s work, no element is simply found, but its origins traced and sensed. None of her work is photography in the straightforward sense of the term. Each element in her highly constructed images, even the most banal looking piece of concrete or dust, is carefully considered and (dis)placed. Her composite and multilayered images allow for a parallax view of several layers across time and space and are inscribed in the record of a duration.