Original stories from real life by Yaron Lapid

About

YARON LAPID Yaron Lapid's Original Stories From Real Life is a multilayered project that utilises found images and film footage as raw material. It reflects upon the redundancy of photographs in contemporary visual landscape, and poses the question of whether a single image can still maintain photography's primary ability - to be simultaneously individual and symbolic — in a world constantly exposed to visual stimulation and overproduction. The first part of Original Stories presented in this show, consists of a group of disparate photos, mainly from English life, that have been consigned to the trash heap. From these the artist has produced images which, when presented together, reveal poignant moments in individual and cultural experience that are partly forgotten by society. As if in a process of zooming in and zooming out, the viewer is invited to engage with each frame individually as well as to discover the multiple associations, either formal or conceptual, that can be drawn between them. A new meaning that potentially existed in the images' internal structure, surfaces out of their interaction allowing a link between photographs from different sources and aesthetic parameters, from the family snap to the commercial still life. In this act of re-editing, the artist reclaims images that would otherwise have been discarded and reassigns them a value beyond their specific history and purpose. If contemporary culture can be understood as a continuous movement of accumulation and disposal of images, Lapid discloses the poetic potential of the surplus within photographic production. The meticulous process of gathering and pairing enhances the role of the image as a mirror to observe personal relations and social patterns as well as to reflect on the contradictory impulses of our lives as consumers as well as viewers. (Gaia Tedone)