Igael Shemtov with Rona Yefman and Allen Frame

The Photo Album, 1979-80

Thursday, February 12th at 7 pm
Admission $3. Seating is very limited.
Q & A to follow the discussion.

Please join us for a conversation between Igael Shemtov, Rona Yefman, and Allen Frame as they discuss Shemtov’s series ‘The Photo Album, 1979-80,’ a project that he intended to publish in the early 80s but that is only now being published as a limited edition artist book of two volumes. In this body of work Shemtov looks at lower-middle-class living environments in Israel during that period, depicting both interiors of private homes and exterior public spaces. For this show, Shemtov and Yefman have selected approximately 70 photographs from the series, of which only 16 were previously exhibited at the Open Museum of Photography Tel-Hai Industrial Park, in Israel in 2009.

This conversation is held in conjunction with Igael Shemtov’s solo exhibition held in the Baxter St at CCNY artist space, and curated by the artist Rona Yefman, one of his former students at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, where he was Chair of the Photography, Video, and Computer Imaging Department from 1994-2000.

Bios:
Igael Shemtov was born in Israel in 1952, and lives and works in Binyamina, Israel. Between 1975-1983 he studied art and photography in Israel. From 1983-1985 he pursued his MFA at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He has taught at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem since 1979. Between 1994-2000 he was Chair of the Photography, Video and Digital Imaging Department at Bezalel. He has also taught at other colleges and universities in Israel, including Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl Collage, Haifa University, Wizo Haifa Academy of Design and Education, Camera Obscura School of Art, Tel Aviv, and Musrara School of Art, Jerusalem. Since 1978, he has had solo shows in museums and art spaces in Israel and participated in dozens of group shows in Europe, Israel and the U.S. His work is in such museum collections in Israel as The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Haifa Museum of Art; and The Open Museum of Photography, Tel-Hai Industrial Park as well as private collections in Israel and abroad.

Rona Yefman received a BFA from Belzalel Academy, Jerusalem in 1999, and completed postgraduate studies at Bezalel Academy, Tel Aviv, in 2003. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Her work explores social, political and personal issues of identity through portraiture in context, working extensively with certain individuals to portray their heightened, radical personas. She is based in New York, and since 1999, has been exhibiting her work in Israel, Europe and in the U.S. where she currently teaches in the graduate program of Columbia University School of the Arts.

Allen Frame is represented by Gitterman Gallery in New York where he has had solo exhibitions in 2005, 2009, and 2013.  His 2013 exhibition Dialogue with Bolaño was presented at the Museum of the Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico, in 2014.  Detour, a compilation of his photographs over a decade, was published by Kehrer Verlag  Heidelberg in 2001.  He co-founded the contemporary art center Delta Axis in Memphis in 1992, and in 1990, he co-created  Electric Blanket, an epic slide show about AIDS, which toured throughout the U.S. and to Norway, the U.K., Germany, Hungary, Japan, and Russia.  He has been the curator of exhibitions at Art in General, including Darrel Ellis in 1996 and In This Place in 2004; at PS122 Gallery, including Bearings: the Female Figure in 2006; and at the Camera Club of New York, including Linda Salerno: A Selection of Experimental Photographs from the Black Mirror Series and Anatomy, Persona, and the Moment: 70’s Experimental Photographs of Luigi Di Sarro.  He currently serves as the President of the Board of the Camera Club of New York, and he is an Executive Producer of Joshua Sanchez’s feature film Four, released in 2013. He has been the recipient of grants from the Penny McCall Foundation, the Peter Reed Foundation, Creative Time, Art Matters, CECArtslink and others.  He teaches photography at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and the International Center of Photography. He graduated from Harvard University in 1974.