Shosh Kormosh: Part I, Specters

Classical film photography had a strong claim to the truth. It was so real, one might say, that it was admissible as evidence in a court conviction. According to that claim, there was once a real light, which touched on something real in the world, and this magnificently real radiation itself scorched its imprint on the celluloid in the moment of truth in which the film was exposed to its power. Even an old photograph, which has been through, say, a washing machine and has become difficult to decipher, has a greater claim to the truth and more admissibility as evidence in court than the most realistic painting in the world. Moreover, hidden behind this is the claim that the origin of untruth lies in human intervention. After all, the camera is objective. A mere apparatus. Although these arguments are very far removed from modern-day photography, which is staged and manipulated with Photoshop, which is extracted from anonymous oceanic image banks, nonetheless—our immediate, natural tendency when viewing a photograph is to believe that "it was so."

One can easily imagine a painter responding to photography's truth claim by saying that photography uses the appearance of truth to lie: that is why it is so appropriate to the advertising industry. As painting conveys reality through the human element, visibility becomes distorted, but art extracts a psychological truth. (From a psychoanalytic perspective, one can think of the difference between the obsessive and the hysterical: an obsessive person gives you every detail about the event, except for his feelings, which are the heart of the matter; his truth is meaningless. The hysterical, on the other hand, may lie to you, but his lies will surrender his anxieties and the truth about his feelings).

Shosh Kormosh (1948, Germany – 2001, Tel Aviv) took photographs like a painter; photography that produces truth as a by-product of the total relinquishment of the claim for truth; photography that declares its artificiality in advance; photography of cut and pasted photographs, with a background "drawn" for them, which have become ghosts of themselves. In doing so, she may have prepared them to talk about loss. These are echoes of objects, photographs cut from catalogues, objects isolated from the world, drowning in light or immersed in darkness, lost, imprisoned, always on the verge of decline, as if flickering at us for a moment and soon the light will go out on them, or increase and flood them with its blinding whiteness.

These delicate, poetic photographs are works of memory and oblivion. They are often concerned with the Holocaust of European Jewry. The objects they left behind. Silent agents of memory and forgetfulness. These communities, annihilated in their entirety, without even a cake recipe or catchphrases and typical jokes left of them. Only a comb, a bracelet, a man's collar. Like a few feathers, still hovering after the birds have migrated.

I say works of memory and forgetfulness, not works of memory. These photographs are the opposite of a monument. They are not a sign in a space dedicated to memory (which quite conveniently leaves the rest of the space for oblivion, just as Remembrance Day frees the other 364 days to forgetfulness), but images of something already forgotten. Something that being forgotten is part of its essence. The power of these photographs lies in this very soft spot, in their relinquishment of eternity, in their flimsiness; in their being fine, pale, ghostly, indeed spectral—that is why they are so haunting.

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