I have always had the feeling that old family photos are passed down from one generation to the next as a kind of coded message that would perhaps one day be deciphered. The Israeli artist Nurit Gur-Lavy conveys this very idea to me through her recent photogravure project. In ‘Kaplan Family 1904’, Gur-Lavy makes use of her ancestral family portrait taken in the early 20th century. In the picture, we can see a group of people in their Sunday best, with their gaze directed at the camera that’s hoping to capture a moment in their regular life. Looking at it from a distance of over a hundred years, we can see Gur-Lavy’s past become our collective present. Having no archive of my own to draw from, I have been inspired by this example of Gur-Lavy’s surviving family archive to imagine how my own family’s past could have looked like. As depicted in ‘Kaplan Family 1904’, this archetype of a large European family documenting its present in the early 20th century is past rendered relevant through Gur-Lavy’s artistic intervention.

As her source material for this photogravure project, Gur-Lavy used a family portrait that was taken in 1904 in Minsk, Belarus. Had we seen the original portrait, we might have thought that there were ranks and hierarchy within this family. However, the artist knowingly does not show us the original photograph. Thus, we find Gur-Lavy assuming the role of an omniscient narrator. She knows the names and ages of everyone in the portrait – knows how their lives unfolded and what became of them. Moreover, she knows also how the historical events of the 20th century such as wars and immigration impacted this family and reshaped it. Indeed, she knows it all, but she is choosing to keep this knowledge to herself. Her aim is to break with the hierarchies and tell a single story out of the many that this picture could have told by bringing into the spotlight the character that she keeps nearest to her heart. That is why in her artwork, the original family photograph has been split into multiple portraits. Gur-Lavy groups the members of the Kaplan family into three different series: Blue, Black, and Red, using the same 1904 family portrait for each. As in the Blue series, the ranks and hierarchies are also absent from the Black and the Red series. 

If we look closer at the Blue series... READ MORE

Nurit Gur Lavy (Karni) (b. in 1952) lives and works in Kfar Yona, IL.

She studied at the Israel Hershberg School in Jerusalem (2000). Graduated from HaMidrasha School of Art in Ramat HaSharon (1984). Holds a Bachelor's Degree in special education and history from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1975).