IN LIGHT OF SHADOWS

In the last three decades, along with varied phenomena of a wide, free use of photography by visual artists, a great deal of staged photography has been created and shown. This type of photography depicts a world verging on fantasy, projecting, mostly ironically, on the way we read "reality" in the age of electronic media as well as on the doubtful objectivity of photography itself.

The work of Malka Inbal is staged, created in a studio, and is a kind of visual illustration of her ideas and experiences. She does not try to reconstruct "natural" situations drawn from reality as we know it, but rather creates dramatic, fantastic worlds, intentionally reminiscent of a theater stage. Her attitude is serious, emotional and romantic, and in that sense her work is closer in spirit to perceptions of the 19th century arranged photography than to the sophisticated, smart staged photography of today.

Inbal's work is essentially "narrative". She responds to human situations rooted in the mundane, routine aspects of everyday life, which captivate her and inspire her images. "Everyone knows those small moments of escape, pain, loneliness and loss. The pictures I make narrate those moments as experienced by families, couples, children, parents, at home and at work. The more I listen and relate to people, the more life appears to me as a grand, enchanting riddle". These sentences are the photographer's way to summarize her entire work in a nutshell. In her imagination, thoughts turn into pictures, which she notes and files away till the time is ripe to turn them into photographic works.

The realization of those images necessitates a studio production. It is an elaborate, laborious process requiring organization and the technical command of photographic equipment and accessories. Malka inbal uses photographed and painted backdrops and plastic silver drapery which is transparent and reflective at the same time, thus creating deluding combinations of scenes that are at once concrete and distorted, blurred and sharp. Lighting is crucial to her work. It functions in different ways, depending on the surfaces and objects it falls on. A special difficulty arises from working with models, mostly dancers, who are directed by the artist into the scenes she pre-plans and contemplates.

The general appearance of Malka Inbal's work is dark and gloomy. There is more black than white, and human figures are more like shadows than bodies with volume and weight. On the stages she creates, she shows dramas where compositions of silhouettes represent, in both abstract and metaphoric manner, the Human Condition in its various aspects.

Those works can be seen as a pessimistic depiction of the world, where human beings are doomed and forced to be together, for better and worse. And yet, one can identify in them great love for dramas of light and shade, allowing the artist to express not only her ideas and experiences, but also her sensitivity to format tension and its inherent beauty and depth.

Avraham Eilat