Facing the Sun
- Inbal Cohen Hamo
- Jan 22
- 9 min read
Updated: Jul 24
The solo exhibition Aerial Roots by Iris Hassid, curated by Eti Schwartz, presents a photographic journey that weaves together three generations of a single family, using a Kodak Retina C2 camera from 1950. Through the lens of her father’s historic camera, the first native-born Israeli in the family, Hassid explores the tension between personal and national narratives and the shifts in Israeli identity across generations. In a conversation between the artist and the curator, questions of belonging and continuity arise, along with insights into how the exhibition was built and curated.
Iris Hassid: Hi Eti, how are you? Today we’ll talk about the exhibition Aerial Roots that you curated for me, and also accompanied me in working on over the past six months.
Eti Schwartz: Did you want to present a solo exhibition?
Iris Hassid: Yes, I spent a long time thinking about what to do with the photos I found of my father and his brothers, and how to incorporate them into an exhibition. In our first meeting, I showed you the photographs, and you thought they should be included in the show. That’s when I realized they had artistic value beyond their family meaning, as part of the archive.
Eti Schwartz: When we met, you spoke about the photographs and also about the slide archive you had found. That felt to me like Chapter A.
Iris Hassid: Right, it indeed is Chapter A. In Chapter B, I’ll continue photographing and researching the Kodachrome slides and Super 8 films that my father shot during a homeland visit with my mother and colleagues, across most of the occupied territories and holy sites in August 1967, a month after the end of the Six-Day War.
Eti Schwartz: Before you dove into those beautiful and emotionally charged materials that you didn’t photograph yourself, I felt it was worth spending a bit more time with you as a photographer.
Iris Hassid: That’s very moving to hear, and I’m very grateful to you for that.
Eti Schwartz: I thought it would be good to focus on the performative actions that are part of your photographic approach, especially after your work on the student project and the book you published. In my view, the sharp shift from diving into the lives of Palestinian Israeli students to a deeply personal story could not have happened if you hadn’t been grieving your father’s death and discovering the photographs from his youth.
Iris Hassid: That’s true. The longing comes through in the photos I found. I felt it was a way to tell a personal story, especially at this moment, in this terrible year. I felt the need to reveal and share, through images of the third generation, the complexity I feel in my everyday life here, with the conflict and the deeply different narratives of the two peoples constantly present. That shift became clearer after finishing the project with the young Palestinian women and after my father’s death, which was so meaningful in my life and also represented, for me, a kind of Israeli identity I loved. I felt the need to explore the family narrative.
Iris Hassid: Can you expand a little on that Israeli identity?
Iris Hassid: It is a sense of Israeli identity that is at ease with itself and its body. A love for the land and for agriculture, the kind of identity I was raised on. Even though I did not know him as a farmer, but more as a man of the world, I sensed his connection to the land, how he would stop in different fields while traveling to check the crops and smell the soil. An identity without questions. The place was clear to them, and so was the sense of belonging. No questions, no preoccupation with the past. Whereas I, and many of us, do deal with the past. We do not deny the Palestinian injustice that occurred, the Nakba, and we also worry about the future and about this place in recent years. That connected, for me, with this past year and the disaster in the kibbutzim and moshavim, not only in the south but especially in the Gaza border area on October 7. It took me a long time to shift focus, to begin photographing other subjects and people. It has been nearly ten years since I started working with the young Palestinian women..
Eti Schwartz: In the portraits you took with your father’s camera that are shown in the exhibition, clothing plays a significant role in reading the markers of time across the three generations. That was also noticeable in your previous works.
Iris Hassid: Clothing is part of how we define our identity, especially garments related to rituals, the military, events, and more. I am fascinated by it. In photography, it allows me to offer an explanation, a kind of code, about who the person is. And also because it connects to beauty and aesthetics. Clothing has both symbolic and cultural meaning, and it also expresses a sense of pride and belonging, like the shirts and scarves that football fans wear to matches. In my home, it is the red shirt and red scarf of Hapoel Tel Aviv. Nir’s father, for instance, wears a white undershirt in the kibbutz field, while Nir stands beside him in a wrinkled white T-shirt. That charges the portrait and their relationship with another layer of meaning. I see David walking around the house in that white undershirt over the years. He is 97 now. For me, it always connects to the early days of Zionism and to the clothing of the pioneers and kibbutz members in the past. I usually take photos with my phone, capturing moments and people that interest me, and I save them in my archive of ideas. Many of those images are related to clothing details. These details in the photo allow me to express what I want to say. There is also an element of self-representation and identity in it, and something a bit revealing. In how I dress, for example, I try not to reveal too much of myself.
Eti, tell me about your decision not to frame the works I photographed. You wanted to leave them exposed, in a floating frame without glass. Why?
Eti Schwartz: Exposed photographic paper has a very strong sensory presence. I wanted people to feel, through their gaze, the presence of the subjects, as close as possible to the real thing. And I wanted the dense handwriting in the notebooks to appear hyper-realistic, even sharper and clearer than the original itself. Glass, even the best kind, would have dulled that raw presence.
Iris Hassid: Interesting, it works. A fellow curator told me she felt the subjects looked exposed.
Eti Schwartz: You photographed them facing the sun, which was very blinding. The difficulty of keeping their eyes open also creates that sense.
Iris Hassid: My father and his brothers were also photographed facing the sun in the afternoon, but the light must have been gentler. Perhaps it was taken in winter. My subjects, on the other hand, really struggled to keep their eyes open and complained about the brightness. I had originally intended to shoot in the late afternoon light, which was meant to be softer. I was aware of the discomfort, and in hindsight, it matched my desire to show the contrast and the challenges between past and present. To reflect a sense of estrangement.
Eti Schwartz: If I may add one more thought about the paper—in the photographs of Nir and his father David, the paper is slightly different, a semi-gloss type more suited to large format photography. The sharpness in their faces and clothing invites repeated looking in a way that one cannot do with a real person, because it is impolite to stare.
Iris Hassid: Interesting, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I trusted you from the very beginning and let go, gave you full freedom regarding paper types, prints, size, and framing, and I am very glad I did. I feel that this is a kind of collaborative creation. I feel your hand and your line throughout the exhibition, in the installation, the hanging, and the selection of works.
Eti Schwartz: You wrote that you felt trust, and that means a lot to me—like in music, in a collaborative performance between musicians.
Iris Hassid: It also means a lot to me, to feel that trust.
Eti Schwartz: The sense of estrangement or the question of belonging is central to the exhibition. Like aerial roots that anchor in the air and not deep in the soil, they allow for a connection to the ground but remain fragile and unstable.
Iris Hassid: The themes of alienation and belonging accompany me in all my projects, probably due to our different transitions in life, which are especially reflected in this exhibition. The young men are at a stage of transition and identity formation, like others their age. They do not belong to the places where they are photographed, in the fields, they all live in Tel Aviv. It is both foreign to them and part of them, because the kibbutz is their grandparents’ home.
In contrast, the photographs of my father and his brothers in the fields show them as very much part of the place, of the land, and proud of it. The question of belonging has been deeply shaken over the past year.
Roots are unsettled, things are changing, and for some of the younger generation, a real question arises: does this place have a future? That is what I wanted to explore in the family context, the shifts between generations in relation to the working settlement movement and to this place.
The changes over three generations are immense. The confident gaze toward the future seen in the photos of my father and his brothers does not exist in the younger generation. Nir, my partner, left the kibbutz in his twenties, and on both sides of my family, there is no continuation of that project, with all the complexity and problems that came with the settlement movement. It is the dream and its unraveling. And what connects past and present is that all of them are photographed against the horizon line.
Eti, I wanted to ask you about your decision to hang the portraits of the young men along the edge of the wall and not in the center, and also the decision to separate them, except for the two portraits of Ofek and Yuval. I think it was a good decision. They fill the space with their presence and their gaze.
Eti Schwartz: The exhibition is a combination of photographs from your father’s time, your own photographs, and his notebook. The idea was to create something composed of layered time. The exhibition space as a whole is different from the way you worked or photographed. The division appears in your process, but in the installation, they come together as one piece that represents the gaps between the three generations, and in doing so, raises the question of belonging to this place.
The landscape background in both your portraits and those your father took is the ambiguous element in the exhibition. It raises the question of why these things are even there, especially when contrasted with the dense handwriting and the desire to master knowledge and, through it, the land.
Iris Hassid: Yes, I agree. And the curatorial explanation about the notebook and the desire to master the land through it, compared with the earth and the soil that appear in the background and within the image, is very thought-provoking. The connection is interesting beyond the aesthetics of the notebook from my father’s school days at the Kadouri Agricultural School.
Eti Schwartz: About masculinity… I think it is something that really concerns you in this context—your father, your partner, the pioneering ethos compared to today. It is the second voice in the exhibition. It is not the main focus, but one can sense that in your photography there is no attempt to shoot as they once did, from below and in glorification, but rather in a direct way. So the hero and the antihero are present in each of the subjects.
Iris Hassid: Yes, it is true that I relate to masculinity through my father and Nir, and not through my sons or nephews in the photographs. I am interested in transitional stages, in formation and identity building, and gender is part of that. I love your sentence, “The hero and the antihero are present in every frame.”
Eti Schwartz: In the printing, I really felt that the brown, the blue, the sand, and the skin tone needed to be as close to reality as possible. The light blue, which shifts slightly depending on the sun’s angle or the warmth in the light, connects to a very basic earth tone—like in children’s drawings. The notebook and the old photos have also yellowed with time, and they become visual objects of belonging and time.
Iris Hassid: Color really does have a strong presence in the exhibition and the prints. The clothing and skin tones of the figures are not dominant and blend in with the two prominent colors—the sandy brown and the shifting sky blue, just as you said. Like with clothing, my use of color, for instance in color fields like the sky, allows me to express through staging what I want to say.
Eti Schwartz: I am already looking forward to seeing your continued work, and the photographic and historical treasures in your father’s archive.
Iris Hassid: Thank you so much, Eti. I am sure you will be among the first to see it. I am grateful for our collaboration on this exhibition and thankful for it.
Eti Schwartz: Thank you.
Curator: Eti Schwartz
Binyamin Gallery
9.1.25 to 15.2.25
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