Here Comes Snow: Orit Raff

We all know snow is coming as winter approaches in the Northeastern United States, but we might as well celebrate it by looking at art instead of complaining. When I first saw Orit Raff’s works, they reminded me of stuff outside that gets buried in snow, leaving little clues to just what is being covered. Raff’s close-up photographs of things we see every day are presented as something actually quite visually appealing and—in the case of these two works—snow white!

Orit Raff (born 1970, Israel), Untitled (Freezer #6), 2000. Chromogenic print on paper mounted on aluminum, 40" x 50" (101.6 x 127 cm). Courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York. © 2024 Orit Raff. (AK-655)

The series Freezer is a group of images Raff produced in the late 1990s. The huge photographs document her own neglected freezer. The size of the print has an almost abstract, although evocative, impact. The colors and forms may recall snow scenes of German Romantic painters. However, the stark simplicity and close-up focus are closer in spirit to Precisionism or Minimalism. The recontextualization of the freezer as a landscape totally approaches the level of irony seen in the readymades of Surrealist artists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and the elevation of everyday commercial objects to the level of fine art with Pop Art. All the while, series like Freezer are inexorably connected to the human experience, human action (or inaction), and a romantic element in the implied sense of neglect or loss. By photographing mundane spots in close-up and isolation, Raff lends a certain monumentality to the subject, as well as an ironic beauty.

From the beginning of the 1900s, visual arts in Israel showed the influence of the converging of East and West, and of the land itself. Organized art activity began in 1906 with the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, which sought to encourage Jewish artists to study in Israel.

In the wake of the interest in pop culture during the 1970s and the advent of affordable methods of digital photography in the 1990s, many photographers found it aesthetically more interesting to turn to color photography. In color photography of the 21st century, the interest in consumerist emblems of everyday life has transcended to deserted city streets, waste products, and abandoned or neglected elements of everyday culture.

Contemporary color photography can be romantically nuanced, eerie, sensuous, or stark, but it is rarely a mirror of reality. There is an element of ambiguity and a distrust of the accuracy of an image’s color due to the saturated dyes of color film. These contemporary photographs often seem to have similarities to the harsh realities of contemporary social conditions.

Born in Jerusalem, Raff studied there at the Bezalel Academy from 1992 to 1994. She also studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, earning a bachelor of fine arts in 1996, and earned a master of fine arts from Bard College in 2002. Raff's photography concerns the human condition and memories documented by physical elements humans leave behind. She feels that school years place a key role in memory formation, when home environment is exchanged for a social one.

The beginning of Raff's mature work, between 1997 and 2004, was the documentation of common physical elements in the surroundings of everyday life. These series feature documentation of a person without directly focusing on that person, instead showing objects in the spaces that person occupied. The series Inside Drawing combined images from elementary school and public spaces to evoke earliest memories. Her series White (1997–1999) focused on the neutral objects of the living space such as a toilet, bed, and bathroom drain to introduce clues about the body occupying the space.

Orit Raff, Untitled (toilet bowl), from the White series, 1997. Chromogenic print on paper, 24" x 20" (61 x 50.8 cm). Courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York. © 2024 Orit Raff. (AK-4346)

Correlations to Davis programs: Experience Art: 2.1; A Personal Journey 2E: 9.5; The Visual Experience 4E: 9.1; Focus on Photography 2E: chapter 4, chapter 8