photo essay: Alexander Mendelevich

ALEXANDER MENDELEVICH

It’s seems that in now reality all of our feelings are being repressed into one superficial facade. In this facade there is only one type of beauty that implies perfection. There is a different existence though, in which all of our immediate needs and desires are being shown, an existence in which imperfection is in fact a perfection. It’s a kind of space where everything that sums us as human beings is intensively put together. In these photographic scenes, our pain, our vulnerability, our desires and fears are shown through distorted bodies and absurd situations. A play implying the contact with object functions as a search, a test and discovery of various thresholds of the sensuous and an exploration of relations with one’s self and the environment.  I am looking for a different perfection in humanity. It is interesting for me to expose it through drama, the drama of being. I am trying to find these moments in ordinary things that fill our lives, like our emotions, events at work or with the family, happiness or unhappiness in relationships, good food with the man you love or lonely supper on a holiday and various combinations of local and general history in our life. Thousands of things in our every day existence,  things which make us sensual. To look for existence, a story in everything, to transform some moments that I saw, I thought, I felt and I dreamt into visual representation. It is kind of speech, dialog with myself and with the whole world, the reflection of my thoughts and experience, my reaction and position toward different events. Staged photography gives me more control to make the occurring more sharp, to build a reality on the set like a sculptor, when you can feel every detail, where 1/60 sec. of exposure is transformed to something permanent. It’s like trying to compress life to one regular situation and to turn emotion and feeling into an object.

 

ALEXANDER MENDELEVICH was born in Pyatigorsk, in the Northern Caucasus region of Russia in 1979. After high school and three years at an institute of economy and management, he moved to Israel in 2000. He served in the army from 2002 to 2004, and from 2004 to 2008, and completed his B.F.A. study at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (Photography department). He participated in several exhibitions in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tirana and in Moscow, took part in Japan Media Arts Festival (Excellence Prize) and in festival of staged  photography at Aktives Museum Spiegelgase, Wiesbaden, Germany. There are two publications in Burn Magazine ( Finalist of Emerging Photographer Fund 2010 by Burn Magazine). He now lives in Tel Aviv. Website:  www.wix.com/mendelevich/alexander