The artist Gilad Bar-Shalev presents "Portraits of the Everyday"
Opening of the exhibition: 28/9/2025 at 18:30 pm
Curator: Lola Vilenkin
For nearly two decades, Gilad Bar-Shalev (born Jerusalem, 1981) has navigated two parallel paths as a photographer. He built a commercial studio in Tel Aviv, photographing mostly fashion, products, and portraits. Alongside this, he has developed an artistic practice. Like Walter Benjamin’s flâneur wandering through the 21st century, he works with film, deliberate observation, and encounters that unfold at a pace far from the speed of advertising and fashion.
The duality between these two worlds defines his work. The studio disciplines his eye: it sharpens his sense of light, aesthetics, and the seductive power of images. The artistic practice, in contrast, strips away staging and artifice, focusing instead on trust and dialogue. For Bar-Shalev, no photograph is possible without communication. The people in his images, whether in the streets of Tel Aviv, in the hills of East Jerusalem, or in New York and Paris, stand before the lens not as actors in a performance but as collaborators in a moment of recognition.
For these projects, he often turns to large-format film photography. Unlike digital cameras that can produce hundreds of images in seconds, these instruments demand patience and precision. Bar-Shalev works with two cameras: a Deardorff 8×10, built in Chicago more than seventy years ago, and an Ebony 4×5, handcrafted in Japan. Each sheet of film allows only a single exposure. Every stage—loading in darkness, carrying the heavy camera, composing on the ground glass, developing, and scanning—underscores the weight of intention. This discipline of film also informs the way he works digitally: he lingers, waits for the right instant, and avoids taking excess frames.
Through his lens, Bar-Shalev captures portraits of the everyday. His subjects stand fully present before the camera, still undecided whether they can trust the man behind it, their vulnerability illuminated in the clarity of that gaze.
