The Shadow of Memory: the photograph as longing and nostalgia

The photographic oeuvre of Roi Kuper is imprinted with absence and remorse. The reality with which he deals is as evasive as memory. Like memory, it dissolves, allowing no real possibility of grasping it. How else can one define an extended journey to Dover, in England, the sole intention being to photograph the famous white cliffs that gradually disappear as one departs from them? Is it not a yearning to create specific images whose importance lies not in what they show us, but in what is blurred, has disappeared, until all that remains is just a fragment of memory?

Kuper’s work, much of which is dedicated to aspects of the sea, is always connected with an idea or a subject that preoccupies him. As he says, essentially he derives inspiration from poetry and prose alike. He affirms that he does not wander about and photograph scenes that appear by chance. He sets out with a purpose and a target. As soon as he has decided on a subject, he photographs immediately, and then deals with the material and the printing of the selected images. The negative is the source, the basis for preparation of the work. If he feels it necessary to modify the elements of the image in order to improve it, or to discard sections that deviate from his general intention, he has no hesitation about doing so.

More than once, Kuper has remarked that he has been influenced by the ideas of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (ca.535-475 BCE), known as the “melancholy”. His famous saying “no man steps into the same river twice”, relating to his concept that everything is constantly influx, is substantiated in Kuper’s serial images of the surface of the sea. They look, at first glance, as if they consist of copies of a single photograph. In this connection, it is interesting to recall the work of the Japanese artist Nobuo Yamanaka (1948-1982) who projected onto the surface of the River Tama a film of the flow of that same river, in 1971.

In many conceptual art works, how the viewer absorbs them derives from information or description of an idea, and not necessarily from a visual picture that is richly defined. In the series“Atlantis”, as in Kuper’s images of the sea and other watery surfaces, we find sequences of surfaces that seem motionless, with no waves or sparkling light. The movement of the waves or of the wind in the vegetation is minimal but faithfully conveys the sense of time passing. Atlantis, the lost continent, is riddle and Utopia, and the surface of the water where it perhaps sank, which Kuper photographed, offers no solution to the mystery. Rather, it increases our doubts and gives rise to further reflection.

In the black-and-white series “Drowning”,the surface of the sea extends to the horizon, illuminated by patches of light.Closer scrutiny reveals the slight human figures in the foreground. Of course this kind of work raises questions about time, a subject that is integral to the essence of photography. On one hand, Kuper freezes and fixes the specific moment caught in the camera’s eye, as in any traditional photo. On the other hand, as someone who is fascinated by change and transience, he creates series of “stills”, taken one after the other at a specific location over a short period of time, and the viewer is required to continuously compare these images in order to actualize the experience of movement in time.

In the series “Vanishing Zones”, Kuper has not merely documented the transient, but has deliberately created it by means of aggressive treatment of the material that bears witness even to the extent of crumbling and destroying it. Indeed, it is this destructive activity that has given rise to images that are so actual, have such a strong presence, in which the memory of the material itself is integrated in the photographic image. The process brings to mind the other epithet attributed to Heraclitus: “The unlike are joined together, and from differences the most beautiful harmonies arise, and every thing happens through strife."

This type of work is not easy to absorb.It sometimes touches on the edge of boredom and banality. To attempt it, one must render oneself to the artist’s vision, and be prepared to acknowledge the possibility of an extreme experience whose power is evident in the obscurity and minimal visibility that are characteristic of his work.

When Yonatan Amir interviewed him in 2006, Kuper said, among other things:

‍I deal with the automatic gaze of the viewer, which is supposed to identify a picture within seconds, and to know what it contains and what it has to say. These works try to break down this “quick look”. The small differences between pictures that seem to be virtually identical give rise to further thought. In photography, we are used to looking for and finding when to photograph, when to press the button. I try to shift the defining moment and not to decide when the photograph is “right”. My idea is that if you have five pictures that are almost the same, there actually is no “right” picture.

So what, then, is“right”? ‍

I’m always interested in what isn’t immediately obvious. I have no patience with works that only “Wow” you for a moment. We’re flooded with images like that, and people stand in front of them and say “O.K. Lovely. I get the idea”. I go to places that interest me, places where amazing things happened. I went to photograph the English Channel because that’s where the Normandy Landings happened. But I didn’t go to photograph Normandy. I’ll go and take pictures of where something happened, but I won’t photograph the thing itself.  

Roi Kuper, born in Israel in 1957, began his artistic career at the beginning of the 1980s. As of 1987 he has frequently participated in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and worldwide. He has received prestigious awards and grants in the field of art photography, among them the Kavlin Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Constantiner Prize from Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

 Kuper’s powerful connection with the sea began during his childhood in Ashdod. It continued throughout his service in the Merchant Navy, as a student at the Naval College, and later during his military service in the Israeli Navy.

In a conversation prior to the exhibition he also said:

As a child and youth I spent most of my time by the sea, solitary, looking, building private worlds and destroying them. I think that serving in the Navy confused my imagination and made my view of the sea more realistic because, after all, the sea for us here is a battlefield. However, after violent events the sea always returns to its primordial condition, concealing what happened below, and the legends about it – like the tale of Atlantis. I try to learn about the past, the collective memory, to take it apart, to construct a different memory because, after all, memory is very flexible, and is never absolutely true.

And thus, as in all his work, the sea series that Kuper creates deal poetically and contemplatively with time and with memory’s deceptions, with impermanence and the everlasting changes that make reality indefinable and elusive. It is as if his photographs compel the viewer to become absorbed in contemplation, in meditation that borders on dream, of doubts about what we actually see, of thoughts about belief and art, and perhaps also about questions of identity and existence.

Avraham Eilat

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