I was pretty impressed by Eitan Vitkon's photographic exhibition, "Thorns" in the Emmanual Fremin Gallery. His use of dramatic lighting and curiously textured subject matter lured me in, and then I fell in love with his creation process. He selects images and projects them on to bundles of thorns, and then he reshapes the thorn piles to mimic the forms of the selected images and photographs the result.
Vitkon is an Israeli contemporary photographer who was born in 1967 in a small village in southern Israel. He began his career in art with an interest in landscape, so he studied architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. Eventually, he found more creative gratification from photography, but his attention to form, like in landscape architecture, is evident in his photographic work and processes.
According to an interview with Vitkon, thorns are a symbol of Israel. His photographs of the projections and thorns the surrealist materialization of his feelings towards his native country and the culture and people that inhabit it.
Eitan Vitkon:
"We Israelis are thorns: warm, but also hard and very direct and prickly; sometimes, we can even come off as rude. Americans can be very polite but you can’t always be sure if they say what they mean. We Israelis don’t have that mechanism: we say it as we see it. That’s not always pleasant. Traditionally, our national plant is the Sabra- a fruit that’s very sweet but covered with thorns. After 60 years of living under difficult conditions in this country, the sweetness is gone and we’re left with the thorns."
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