Ana Nitzan has “always taken pictures”, as she likes to describe herself. Her drive to capture fragments of the environing reality, of that which is taken as usual in everyday life, has in time led to a rather wide imagery repertoire. A myriad of subjects freely come and go along her path, pointing perhaps to a stronger interest in recording nature – which the artist is intensely linked with, much closer so than the average distant relationship urban citizens may or are willing to keep with it.
An emphasis may be perceived in her praxis, not of commitment to a specific photographic tradition, in the sense of complying to canons or seeking virtuosity, but rather to obey an urge to value intuition and free experimentation. These features, relying on full language domain and on the refusal of major technical resources, prevent this production to be linked to any style affiliation. Nitzan is primarily committed to photographic art as such, to the exercise of picture observing and catching, thus building up her own visual poetics.
The set of works here exhibited are grouped into three thematic series: landscapes – sky cut-outs embracing rural extensions –, ruins of abandoned houses, and the recording of settings using cloth and water.
The latter emerges as an unfolding issue the artist has been recently most interested in, linked to the feminine universe in its varied manifestations, with a focus on corporality. Cloth acquires imprecise outlines in contact with water, gaining live and amorphous – or rather transmorphous – features of uncertain definition. It is invested with an ambiguous organicity, either conveying volatile carnality in constant mutation, or suggesting dishevelled skin, in turn floating above a watery skin that recovers and reinvents it. There is a touch of tender melancholy in this kind of silent, odd choreography, as if cloth suddenly was taken by an élan vital only to perform a last act on a surface of which it is alien from.
Such presence of cloth-skin arises with new meanings in the indoor images of a farm main house in ruins. It comes up here and there, fluttering or lying over a pile of debris, livened up by the irregular clarity of natural light, as if delicately signalling an absence and evoking the genius loci, the local spirit of the home it has been [the notion of home, as well as that of body, are highlighted among the artist’s more recent interests]. There is in this series a narrative suggestion, on the possibility of reconstitution of a reality lifted in time, by drawing on the hinting elements there present. The focus seems to oscillate between recording mildly evocative tones, for the sake of an affective memory, and capturing some “ready” compositions the place offers, such as the casual thread wire bundles hanging from a wall. By duly framing and transposing them to the photograph levelness, the artist brings them briefly out of forgetfulness and makes them into quasi-engravings or quasi-drawings, sheer line and expressivity.
And there are the skies, the “square” landscapes. This series highlights the baldly elegant objectivity of Nitzan’s production. Images paradoxically focused on the sky emptiness stress the width of reality they bear. In turn, empty skies dialogue with the above mentioned spaces in ruins; but if there the void pointed to absence or activated memory, here it is fleshed up in these fragments of ethereal immeasurableness, secured in idyllic, bucollic scenes.
At the end, one may sense that the set of pictures exhibited is a representative sample of the various aspects of Nitzan’s perspective. Susan Sontag has said that “the most extraordinary achievement of photographic activity is that of allowing us the feeling that we can put the whole word into our minds[1]“; this assertion seems suitable to describe the passionate compulsion with which the artist is devoted to her métier. We are left with the need to keep the discipline to choose among what is presented to the eyes – a hard task, as everything else that requires choice and passion.
Guy Amado
(1) In Sobre fotografia; translated by R. Figueiredo from On photography. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004.