©2024 by Shlomo-Pozner Shlomo Pozner's camera attempts to capture moments in which subjectivity breaks through within totalizing webs of significance. We open with a series of children, dressed more or less the same, reproductions; the photographer gazes at them as if wondering whether he, too, is but another link in the series. There are series of food products, ostensibly strictly kosher - but in them, too, there is no trace of subjectivity, of a "soul." The religious products are heaped up, along with the mess, dirt, and neglect. Subjectivity can appear only within side rooms, as a fleeting escape from the all- pervasive industrialism of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism -- the Judaism that Pozner was raised in, that he allegedly also rebelled against, but to which his camera returns out of love and compulsion alike.
For Pozner's Ultra-Orthodox subjects, only a fleeting refuge in side rooms is possible. For the few rest, fallen angels of totalizing projects who have managed to escape, subjectivity can be given as an absurdity, as a rebellion against the totalizing webs of significance they have been thrown into. His angles make faces for the camera, dressed in items of clothing torn out of their original context within the totalizing webs of religions and armies. The style is popish -- one can almost feel the beat of these photos -- but also strikingly queer: the detached items are worn in desecration, in a kind of fetishistic love that is also a protest against their totalizing industrialization.
Pozner's popish subjects are only allowed to appear if they are holding some signifiers torn from another world, saving them from disappearing both into the total web or the empty void.
There are also other, more morbid moments in Pozner's p photography. For a small number of signifiers, a strikingly dreadful place is reserved -- as if they were taken out of the webs of significance by a more archaic intervention, one which the webs can only dream to fully discipline. Such is the talit (prayer shawl) of Pozner's deceased father, or the cross of Christ. Pozner tries to make these objects less numinous by imposing on them his subversive logic -- by positing them, once again, out of context. But in these rare cases, what appears is not Pozner's popish absurdity, but its opposite: an ominous, fateful dread that strikingly transcends the mischievous attempt to reach subversive subjectivity. The series of total webs, the popish absurd, the dread: they build the structural grammar of Pozner's photos.
For Pozner's Ultra-Orthodox subjects, only a fleeting refuge in side rooms is possible. For the few rest, fallen angels of totalizing projects who have managed to escape, subjectivity can be given as an absurdity, as a rebellion against the totalizing webs of significance they have been thrown into. His angles make faces for the camera, dressed in items of clothing torn out of their original context within the totalizing webs of religions and armies. The style is popish -- one can almost feel the beat of these photos -- but also strikingly queer: the detached items are worn in desecration, in a kind of fetishistic love that is also a protest against their totalizing industrialization.
Pozner's popish subjects are only allowed to appear if they are holding some signifiers torn from another world, saving them from disappearing both into the total web or the empty void.
There are also other, more morbid moments in Pozner's p photography. For a small number of signifiers, a strikingly dreadful place is reserved -- as if they were taken out of the webs of significance by a more archaic intervention, one which the webs can only dream to fully discipline. Such is the talit (prayer shawl) of Pozner's deceased father, or the cross of Christ. Pozner tries to make these objects less numinous by imposing on them his subversive logic -- by positing them, once again, out of context. But in these rare cases, what appears is not Pozner's popish absurdity, but its opposite: an ominous, fateful dread that strikingly transcends the mischievous attempt to reach subversive subjectivity. The series of total webs, the popish absurd, the dread: they build the structural grammar of Pozner's photos.
Text BY DR Itamar Ben Ami