Ani Zur: Fertility
© Ani Zur
The Passing
You photograph who you are. That is, you bring to your work your historical and social perspective. You decide when to “click”. It is a moment of decision.
Photographers have explored various formats for exploring their history and their roots. I would even go as far as to suggest that this exploration, the inquiry, moves beyond making images but to a personal attempt to understand who and what we are, the connections. The “what” is slippery, in that the “what” may be experienced as personal, symbolic and emblematic.
I believe it is naive to think that we can display a personal semiotics that has meaning beyond ourselves, for the construction of meaning, especially personal meaning, lives within the borders of our own private and social context, history, and sense of being. To draw upon a popularization of signifiers is to lose one’s voice. Here, the engaged reader of the image as text (for all images are constructed texts to be reconstructed or read by readers including the author herself) struggles with meaning, of personal understanding of not just one image but the sequence and connections between images. Images do not exist in isolation but are part of a network of other images, meanings and associations. To read an image is draw upon the meanings (language) one has at hand. To look and to know in a manner that can not be verbalized is the power of the image to move beyond the popularization of meaning to a level of understanding; of knowing. Not secret knowledge but a personal way of knowing, of recognition.
Both the author (photographer) and the reader meet at the surface of the image, forming their own experience of the text. The process becomes complex when image sequence and the spaces between images are considered. For it is in the spaces that the understanding. personal or normative, are located. We could reflect upon the emptiness between our memories, for those times and spaces that we forget, are the points where we have lived.
Ani Zur has invited us into her own search for connectedness. She returned home to reconnect to family, the earth and tradition, “to find self-identity”. The string, as a metaphorical and physical construct is the connecting bonding element in her search for who she is, is in reference to historical others and the earth. Her images from Fertility invites the viewer to reflect on their own bonding string, our genetic tie to generations past, to the natural order of things and to the future. As the title Fertility suggests, the past created the present and the present steers the future. The “cult of the mother” (as Zur refers) is tied to the seeds of life, the “string of the universe”, to give birth and continue. In her images we find the past and present giving form and life to the future: The string that binds us all.
Generations go beyond the simple passing on hair color and body form (genetic code). Generations are markers telling us something about ourselves, the roads traveled by those who came before, and our place in history and the future. The image of Zur’s 82 year-old granny, holding her 3 week old grandchild, is the metaphorical string, the connectors between the past and future. The image of a young girl, bare breasted, framed in a torso view, shovel against the wall, point to the past, the present, the future and ties us to natural roots. They function as a pointers connecting the historical nature of shared knowledge and emergence, a history and references to a deeper wider connection: Youth, nature and fertility. As the tree roots stabilize the tree, so does our history. As the tree is connected to life giving earth, all trees are connected to each other through the earth.
Zur refers to nature and fertility throughout her exhibition; linking seeds, feet planted and embedded, tree roots, childbirth and womanhood. Her work points to a link, to experiences deeply buried in our shared psychic and the nature order of things. Various generations of woman (men are notably absent from the generational pool), seeds, plants, collectively and repeated, held together by string. It is the string that connects all the images, not visually, but ideationally and metaphorically. The repeated images of bodies, headless naked breast, intertwined roots of trees connected to both the earth and sky, feet planted and woman’s bodies in various stages of age, binding the images through time and history, the passing. In the end, Ani Zur’s images invite us to not forget our connections, not only to each other and the earth, but to a future determined by the past.
© Roberto Muffoletto, 2017
Author's note:
Ani Zur’s images may move the reader to reflect on their own roots, each in their own way. On a personal note, the image to the left is my string, my roots. Taken in 1961. (photographer unknown)
Go to exhibition | Return to top