Yossi Waxman
Writer, Artist, Designer
A photo novel, the secrets
of a family from Jerusalem
Ein Hod Gallery, January-March 2008
In preparation for writing a novel about my family, I collected old photographs, documents and certificates from which I sought to draw inspiration. Unfortunately, I shelved the sketch for the novel, and later my seventh novel, "Esther of the Cigarettes" was born from it. But the photographs and certificates and pieces of prose I wrote continued to resonate with me.
And so I created the collages, trying to visually tell the story of my family: from Beit Israel quarter, through the Bucharim neighborhood, to the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood. A family from the old city of Jerusalem, that hides a big secret: a grandfather who disappeared under suspicious circumstances, betrayals, debauchery, but also compassion and love.
This is a story of memory: real, imaginary, distorted. A memory that I took apart into details and reassembled in the works.
To the family photographs, the certificates and the texts I wrote I added images such as household utensils, antiques, clocks and toys of the family, which also helped me to weave the secret, the story. This is not a novel with a beginning, middle and end, but fragments of reality (real and imagined), which try to create some kind of one-time, family-like closeness.
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