Ori Gersht – Blow Up, Hide and Seek

Relevant to Abstract idea.

Blow Up

I wonder how anyone can come up with the idea of blowing up flowers and photographing it. It’s wonderfully strange and abstract. The photos are no longer about showing flowers, it’s about colour, form and experimentation. I think Gersht is exploring the classic still life of flowers in a vase and making a comment on it. Maybe he wants to say that it’s time for something new. Maybe he just wanted to do something crazy for fun. The black background in these images remind me further of the classic flower still life that we so often see in paintings. By blowing up the flowers, though, this is no longer a ‘still’ life. It is very much a moving image. There is action and motion. They remind me slightly of fireworks. Just a bang of colours that look beautiful.

Hide and Seek

This body of work has a completely different feel to it than the blow up flowers. This is all about stillness. The images seenm to be very quiet whereas the ones above seem to be teeming with noise. The colours are all pastel and the light is very soft. I understand well from looking at the images why he calls them hide and seek. One is a foggy landscape, one is photographed from behind lots of leaves, one from behind a curtain. They all seem to be hiding in some way. Is the photographer hiding or is it someone else that we can’t see? The title of the work immeadiately makes me think of childhood and games, but the images speak of things more serious and very different, I feel.

My favourite of these images is the last one, the one with the leaves. I don’t know why that is, but it really speaks to me. I think it might be the combination of leaves and water. And the colour yellow. Maybe. The lines of the trees are also wonderful. The reflection in the water makes a reflection which adds another quality to the image.