Eye of the beholder, Hazut Beit Gallery Tel Aviv,  2024
Curator: Hadara Scheflan Katzav
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Eye of the beholder is a cinematic work moving between two realms – Wasserman’s private archive as a photographer and the archive of Mesilot, the kibbutz where she had grown up. The film is about the essence of memory as it is burned into the photograph and its reverberation that crosses distant and near pasts with a continuing present. Wasserman seeks to examine the memory experience of four kibbutz members in an encounter with photographs from the Yom Kippur War, taken fifty years ago and kept in the kibbutz’s archive. The encounter recharges the elusive status of the documentary photograph regarding events and narrative, which have become myths over the years.

Anat Wasserman has studied in the Photography and Cinema Department at the WIZO Academic Center in Haifa for four years. While there, she embarked on a research project, which is still ongoing – studying the medium of photography and asking questions regarding the quintessence of photography in relation to memory. How does the visual document form the story we insist on telling ourselves, our relationships with our family members and the community we belong to, and what occurs in the encounter between photography and those memories and narratives? 

About a month after October 7, Wasserman looked at a collection of photographs she had received courtesy of the kibbutz. In it, she discovered an unmarked folder containing dozens of black-and-white images, in which she could recognize the kibbutz and several members in their younger years. Recurrent themes in the cluster of photographs are soldiers and military figures, children sleeping in bomb shelters, and situations hinting at war or non-routine times. The encounter with the photographs so near the break of war engenders a different gaze upon them, beyond sweet nostalgia, and instantly becomes current. The photographs were made by Hank Neve-Oz, a kibbutz member and amateur photographer who documented the life of the community over the years, up to this day. She has observed these photographs, and by meeting four kibbutz members – Wasserman’s grandmother, her father, the photographer, and another kibbutz member - she tries to find the origin of those photographs. The process of looking starts a process of remembering in the kibbutz members, revealing the memories in their fragility as subjects, even though the depicted event is essentially collective. The encounters are not photographed – they are recorded, and in the editing of the film, Wasserman connects the voices and testimonies with the photographs. The joining of the spoken and the visual text creates layers of memory, processing, and new interpretation regarding the standing of photography. The speakers’ voices turn into matter in Wasserman’s hands, seeking to dismantle and undermine the fixedness of the photograph. Their struggle to remember, in which they often confuse the current war with past years, aspires to present a different point of view regarding war photographs and documentary photography in general.