by Ilit Azoulay
First published 2020
Israeli photographer Ilit Azoulay transforms the Israel Museum in Jerusalem into a repository of forgotten narratives. Born in 1972, Azoulay specializes in creating expansive photomontages that reveal the hidden histories embedded in museum objects. She interviews curators and collection managers, gathering their stories about specific artifacts and artworks housed within the institution. These conversations become the foundation for her distinctive "archive pages." Azoulay photographs countless objects mentioned in these interviews, capturing them in high resolution detail. She then assembles these individual images using Photoshop, stitching them together into complex panoramic compositions that function as visual storytelling devices. Each photomontage serves as a digital catalog that connects objects to their human stories. The book presents these intricate archive pages alongside written essays that provide context for her artistic process and the institutional histories she uncovers. Through her lens, museum storage rooms and display cases become landscapes of memory, where each artifact carries traces of the people who collected, preserved, and studied them.
Genres: art, 21st-century, photography, art-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Israel, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Period: 1972
262 pages · Hardcover · Mousse Publishing