Artists
Gil Ben Hador
Photographer.
I am a photographer around 70 years old, an IT professional and an agronomist.
Since my bar mitzvah I have held a camera in my hand, documenting what my eyes see. In the last decade, I have participated in courses to enhance photography as a tool for personal expression to guide my path towards using photography as a medium for creation, while developing a body of work that characterizes my approach to life and the world around me.
I have longed to be a true magician since childhood. With a word or wave of a finger, I would fly, change the world, stop weapons from firing and evil from taking power. My aspirations haven’t changed, but I have settled in the meantime for the magic of photography. With my camera I transform something that appears to the eye into something completely different. In this moment it gains eternal life. I aspire to capture reality while making it appear as alternate reality, or even revealing how reality itself is not real.
Photography and art allow me to become that magician who with a wave of a finger transposes the world and changes fate. In my work I explore ways to stop time and decay, my own and that of my surroundings, and that of those who exist now, and will not exist forever. I aspire to root out the cracks and fractures in reality and expose them. A significant characteristic of my work is embedding of one object within another. The assimilation may be related to the object’s essence, conflict with it, or be seemingly unrelated, but the embedded image creates the context.
The techniques I use are diverse. I employ digital tools like Photoshop, or family archival materials in printed and tangible photographs. In another method I project an image onto a substrate to create a new image. I have also turned rooms in my house into a “camera obscura,” bringing the outside in to create images caught by the camera with a slow exposure .
I am also the developer of a unique portable “camera obscura” device, which I call “periscamera”. A description of which can be found on my web site: https://specialphotos.org/this-is-the-project.
A central theme in my work deals with crisis situations: Illness, death, personal conflicts, as well as a return to my nuclear family and a reprocessing of individuals from both my past and current life.