NURIT GUR-LAVY (KARNI)
^{Kaplan Family 1904}

^{By Olga Zolin}

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, we will notice that the family’s father, a patriarchal figure who was positioned proudly at the centre of the original composition, has in Gur-Lavy’s rendering been squeezed into one-eighth of a Somerset Satin White paper sheet, which is the smallest format in the series, while the oldest sister and the mother look at us proudly while occupying a quarter of the sheet each. This indicates that in Gur-Lavy’s artwork, the male figures, including the older sons, no longer hover above the younger children and their parents. Thus, she disregards the promise of their advances in society. Similarly, the future political career of another character in the series, Eliezer, has been dismissed, as the boy is made to play only a marginal role in Gur-Lavy visual storytelling in order to centre another character by the name of Sarah. Now, one may ask, who is Sarah? Sarah Kafrit (Kaplan) is a girl who, in the span of half a century, would live a tumultuous life, birth four children, found a town, join the Israeli parliament, and, in 1952, become Nurit Gur-Lavy’s maternal grandmother.

In Gur-Lavy’s Blue series, the individual portraits are hung along a central axis so that the eyes of the people in the portraits meet ours. Here, the central figure, occupying the largest print, is a diptych composition of a four-year-old Sarah, whose portrait is placed alongside some heavily ornamented painted pillars, an element that forms the backdrop of the family picture. This is Gur-Lavy’s homage to a person toughened by heavy labour and hard living conditions, whose vulnerability was not accounted for during her life but whose despair was heard and acknowledged decades later by Gur-Lavy. Sarah was a paragon of virtue whose cries for help were kept hidden so as to not overshadow her political career. However, in Gur-Lavy’s artwork, her voice has been amplified by being presented to us not as that of a state figure, political thinker, fighter, or survivor, but as that of an innocent four-year-old girl whose gaze demands sympathy and understanding, which she receives from us, the audience, thanks to Gur-Lavy's artistic intervention.

This visual storytelling continues through the Black and the Red series. Here, the same family portrait provides a point of departure for Gur-Lavy’s narrative. It appears that the Black series assumes the objective of rendering the gaps in information that the artist keeps from us literally tangible. At first, it looks as if Gur-Lavy wants to reveal her source material, that is, the 1904 family portrait. However, we soon learn that here also she has manipulated the reality of the 1904 document. Instead of showing us the picture as it is, she has turned it into a visual puzzle. By dividing the picture into an invisible grid, Gur-Lavy shifts her attention from one figure to another. Moreover, rather than showing interest in the characters, she appears to draw our attention towards the background against which the family is posing. These details are the true protagonists of this representation. The hands, shoes, draperies, and curtains, even if they are painted and not real, receive most of her attention, which also draws our attention towards those aspects. Thus, Gur-Lavy is presenting us with a fragmented reality where only a few of the characters are allowed to show their faces. In fact, some members of this large family have been altogether omitted from this ‘gathering’, while others have been shushed – or at least that is how it seems when you see them presented only in part. Therefore, when these elements are put together as a whole, what we get is an incomplete image – a puzzle that is missing a big share of its pieces. Wherever there is a character missing, we find only the white wall of the exhibition hall. Those white holes, which represent the gaps in information concerning the family, have become a correction fluid in the hands of the artist, who directs us towards what she wants us to focus on and decides what can be left out in her storytelling.

Red is the colour that dominates the third and final series. In this series of photogravures, Gur-Lavy employs the colour’s generative energy to pair the faces that we have become familiar with in the Blue and Black series into new compositions. By selecting her compositions merely through formal juxtapositions, she forms new dialogues. Printed in red, the images lack the accustomed graphical principle of absolute dark and light. Besides, the entire grey scale is missing too, as there are only two colours: intense red and dark pink. However, it is exactly this reduced colour scale, which hides away the details from the representation, that creates this feeling that we are witnessing the image coming into being. Here, the traditional darkroom comes to mind. Think of the days when photo prints were developed in rooms lit by red light, which was used so as to not overexpose and, consequently, ruin the pictures during the developing process. Therefore, in the murkiness of the darkroom lit by a single red light bulb, an image appears after placing an exposed photo paper into the tray with the developer. Something similar seems to occur in Gur-Lav’s Red series, where the paired images combine to form a new third image. This is art venturing into the abstract dimension of representation. This appears to be the case with the vertical composition that presents a boy’s upsetting stare, which the frames abruptly cut after a visual break of the printing paper’s white space continues into a new image of a chair. The chair’s one leg and the back draw an invisible line along the decorative stripes behind the angry half-face. Moreover, another interesting passage presents itself with a bearded figure that is split into two. Printed on the same sheet of paper as another plate where we see the image of little Sarah, we at first fail to recognise any connection between the two, and yet they are brought together by a dark shape behind them, which is a prolonged arch that starts in one frame and finishes on the other. Perhaps the most emotional of all the five compositions is the portrait of a girl held by a hand on the left and another hand already in a new frame that is emerging from the darkness of the red colour to the right in order to give her support, representing a khamsa that provides her with symbolic protection.