Eldad Rafaeli – The Way To The High Mountain

Photoactive  2019

Hebrew & English text

Photographer Eldad Rafaeli’s new book “The Way to The High Mountain” is his recent and most comprehensive work, incorporating an extraordinary body of work. Carved by light out of the dark shadows, his images invite us to share his innermost thoughts and feelings about the connections he sees between himself and his subject.

Eldad Rafaeli: “Since many years, I’ve been trying to connect complex patterns of observation. These include various approaches and formats, directed at one broad artistic photographic action.

The goal of connecting dozens of projects I shot all over the world, while creating my own language and method of working – rather than relying on  available methods and boundaries previously drawn – have resulted in this book.

Preferably, this body of work would be new, non-linear, and invite questions about time, space, place, awareness, ethics, intimacy and compassion, along with everything else that’s been occupying me all these years.

The de-and-re-construction of these materials is a task that calls for a new perspective, a new structure and also different ways of thinking; being more aware and receptive to aspects of time and consciousness, to the familiar and the contemporary, and mostly to the treatment I’ve been giving these materials so far.”

Gilles Peress: “I always thought that Eldad, as a mature artist, was trying to exorcise demons he encountered when he was a young man in the army. One could never understand his works if one did not recognize what lurks in the shadows of the night; the hidden face of human experience and of human nature.”