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7/4/2003

The magical eye of Doron’s lens

The twenty-eight-year old Doron inherited his creative talent from his father, who introduced his son to the darkroom, where Doron learned a professional approach to the medium of photography. He began appreciating this initiation especially in the last few years, when he has taken a systematic approach to photography.
Until Doron began to exhibit, i.e. right now, he was concerned with matters other than photography, which he also taught himself while at high school. I would emphasise that he concentrated on music, since music is present in his pictures, unheard but distinct. By the way, Doron plays the mouth organ, as does Josef Koudelka, whose work the young adept greatly admires.
The usual division of photographs – but also of filmmakers and writers – is based on the borders of the approaches to the medium in which they do their creative work. Either it is fictitious or documentary. Visitors to the Miro Gallery, based in the Saint Roch Church, will probably decide that they have entered into a cathedral of the snapshot. The shots here are dynamic, expressive, almost perfunctory, as though seen inadvertently. Doron’s coloured and black and white enlargements often create the impression that there was not enough time to spare, that there was not the time and the wherewithal to focus. This deep but kinetic lack of focus is clearly not an unintentional coincidence. Even subjects which obviously are not permitted to escape are treated that way, as it were. This nervy optical effect is based literally on the artist’s hand. It begins already by the choice of lens – and thus the approach to photography in general. The basic focal distance of the lens of a cine-camera is 50 millimetres. Doron gives priority to this lense to wide angle lenses which would offer him a greater depth of field. By means of the 50 mm lens – in photo jargon called basic lens – our photographer brings his viewer closer to the scene depicted. Doron usually captures a rapid segment of a scene, and so we do not see the scene as whole but only its parts.
We do not receive a comprehensive report on the theme, as pre-modern photograph of the 19th century tended towards to. Of course since then the entire world has been photographed so often that we do not any longer visit photo galleries for its “factography”: details, be they fragments or torsos, place the photo images in a special realm.
The photographs exhibited were created in Israel - with one exception in which the change of venue is not clearly recognised. Doron lives in Tel Aviv and this overlooked exception is the picture “Passer-by”, depicting the Kafkaesque horse on Old Town Square taken on one of his visits to Prague to see his father: “He’s taking photos, he’s in a trance,” was the casual – albeit characteristic – explanation, when Doron did not return for a long time from the toils of the Old Town. The picture of gelding is one of a series of animals which the artist is shooting systematically. These are mainly dogs and cats, however not only the domestic variety but desert predators living in cliffs.
Leaving aside a more precise delineation of other thematic areas (above all faces, human forms and bars), we move with Doron through interiors, streets and the beaches of the Eastern Mediterranean. We have a powerful perception of the spaces in which life goes on long into the night, where the heat means airy fabrics are worn, light clothing with short sleeves. Here and there music reverberates, music which we perhaps know, and everywhere – at least according to the pictures – nubile girls are to be seen. This will hardly be an optical illusion. It is rather that the artist continuously secretes special frames of his extraordinarily sensitive film: perhaps he never runs out of material during these critical encounters. There are also photographs exhibited which were created to order. Such is the case, for instance, with pictures of a wedding. Of course, Doron proceeded to treat its subjects as he always does – using interventions in tones, light and composition, he doesn’t hesitate to go as far as creating colours which have nothing to do with colours we’re used to from sober experience. Intoxicated, let us look at the titles of the photographs. Apart from cases where we are presented with the actual names of those figuring in the picture, the titles point to the poeticism of the artist, they serve to accentuate, elevating the pictures above the merely literal from which they originate. “Misty Night” shows a microphone on a now deserted rock stage, in “Milk and Honey" a duo of girls resonate through the magic window of the lens, “Night Journey” again evokes a vision of Meyring’s Golem, as was classically created by Hugo Steiner in the Lipsky edition of the bibliography, printed in 1916.
The centrifugal force of Doron’s photographs can continue from description or can linger on to a hitherto suggested poetics. The picture called “Day of Terror – Immediately After” shows an environment in which an attack has taken place on a bus. On Doron’s suggestion a young boy and a girl are blowing bursting soap bubbles. In contrast to other immediate moments here is a conceptual reaction to the explosion, the destruction of human lives. But in fact all the photographs on exhibit are about this – they are about beings which want to live happily in places where they feel at home.

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