Ben Michael Sheer
Photography
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem
Graduates: 2023
Specialisms:
My location: Jerusalem, Israel
Ben Michael Sheer
First Name: Ben Michael
Last Name: Sheer
University / College: Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem
Course / Program: Photography
Graduates: 2023
Specialisms:
My Location: Jerusalem, Israel
About
I am interested in slow photography - meaning its important for me to learn about a certain place by knowing the people i photograph in person. In that why i understand my relationship to the subject i'm drawn to investigate.Its worth mentioning that my process is slow also due to the fact i'm photographing with a large and medium film cameras - meaning i look a lot, choose my composition’s slowly and then shoot.Im attracted to the fringes of society, since i made immigration myself to israel and grew up as a homosexual in the suburbs with religion and traditional folks all around me.I thinks its right to say that in someway i'm looking for a home in my photography, for some hope and comfort to rely on - due to the fact we moved so many communities and houses as a child.
In a photographic work spanning two and a half years at the Tel Aviv Central Station, I documented spaces and people in its abandoned floors due to its poor planning. You can find there a cinema that once screened cheap sexual movies and today it operates as a fetish club, Dark corridors where prostitutes meet their clients, Empty parking lots with drug addicts looking for ways to escape their bad fortune in life, men in the closet looking for discreet meetings with other men and then returning to their homes (to their wives, to the village or to the synagogue) In the encounters with the people and the spaces, I am confronted with relationships of desire and disgust. Inner Desires, which seeks to meet here and now with repressed pain and violence, but also with the possibility of finding a home and love. Disgust, which seeks to disable forgotten pain and present masochism. More than once the destruction of the station, was talked about in the media as if it was the source of evil in the israeli society. In this work I offer a complex perspective that gives the station an opportunity to be simply what it is: A Last stop or a first stop; A terrifying concrete monster or a comforting "refuge city".
Competitions
