Barry Frydlender
Place and Time
HC 25 x 33 cm.
MoMA 2007
"These are powerful yet very fragile realities, like the land in which they are made, as part of the world in which we live. Each work is like an explosion in which the fragments always re-coalesce, even those like Café Bialik and Café Bialik After, where a real explosion did occur. Still, in Jaffa/Bat Yam there is the side where Jewish settlers live, and the side of the Palestinian cemetery against the Mediterranean Sea, and the diagonal divide between them, along which a young girl seems to dance with her shadow toward a rectangular blank in the scene, left there by Frydlender because the building from which he would have shot a new fragment was no longer there when he revisited the site." Don Goddard -
"The effect is something like history painting, rich in allegorical possibility. Rather than capturing a split second (Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment"), Frydlender's digitalized images are painstakingly pieced together via computer from shots taken minutes, hours, or sometimes months apart?they're photographs with time woven into them. His method is particularly suited to the complexities of life in Israel, a place the news media tend to present in flashes of violence, but where millennia of history may be brought to bear on the meaning of each instant." Leslie Camhi -