eyal ben simon

EYAL BEN SIMON
Photographer,artist and a graphic designer. ten years of work in art and photogrphy .
The supreme vocation of photography is not to search for beauty, but to explain man to man. To experience anything as beautiful is to experience it in a wrong way. We are the ones who give life to rocks and pebbles. Reality is in the eye of the beholder. If you should ask me what I truly photograph, I will say I do not know. Yet ask my photographs, and they will tell you who I am. My world is blurry, moving between reality and a new visual adventure. Photography provided me with everything I have ever desired- an alternative world where I, and only I, control or do not contort its laws. Through photography I create alternative universes, worlds that had been living in me and hiding in my profoundest depths. The far-east cultures speak of man being whole. By nature, man always aspires something he could never reach. I claim that there is no need to be whole, there’s only the need to drain, which is the function of art. The camera is allegedly the most objective tool which is used to depict a common reality, therefore I use it as an objective tool to bring out the truth – my truth, and all in the moment of accident, meaning: in the name of coincidence. By destroying the negative, I build an alternative reality or a new way to look at it. The aspiration for utopia or dystopia is the main motive in these photographs. We live in infinite different realities. The reality I present before you is the one that goes through my lens, becoming an inseparable extension of my eyes, except through it, the true reality in me is reflecting- uncensored. The undisputed role of art is the “uniting” of realities- the viewers and the artists inner worlds. The viewer is the one who eventually determines the world of the piece, therefore instead of fighting him; I’ve decided to add him as an active partner and thus adding a new dimension to the piece that I am not familiar with, and may never be. By viewing the work, the viewer becomes an artist himself who identifies and interprets it by his own personal experience and with it, fantasizes about his own world. For me, rationality is not an option. The dream and fantasy flash controls the piece (meaning: in my inner world) and all is done by breaking light beams aggressively, for our comprehension of the world comes from reflecting light beams. Therefore I take the light, and treat it as material in the hand of the creator. By breaking the light beams I create a new world, a shattered and more beautiful world. Through the wreckage a new metaphoric world is created as a birth of new life, upholding different entities or a kind of evolutionary mutation. The light still controls the work, but this time it controls it my way, thus the light beams and I become one. I use the light as a painter uses his colors and a sculptor carves stone. I’m fascinated by the colors of light, yet if I could truly express myself verbally, I would never carry a camera with me.