Angelika Sher / Series, 2005 - 2012

The raw material of Angelika Sher’s photographic work is supplied by her family and immediate environment. Personal relations and domestic spaces are captured in moments full of longing, remoteness, and a beauty that can hurt. Through these images she explores ideas of foreignness, adolescence, parenting, and sacrifice.
The book is a survey of Sher’s work over a 7 year period, structured around four different series. Upstairs looks at adolescence without innocence and volatile sexuality as enclosed in claustrophobic spaces, with an underlying sense of unease and dissatisfaction. Growing Down looks at adolescents, at their relationships to each other, to space, and to the body. 13 continues the focus on motherhood, while also exploring a greater distance between the camera and its subject. The last series, Twilight Sleep, departs from the nuclear family to investigate notions of cultural memory, destiny, and death.

 Angelika Sher, a Lithuanian-born Israeli photographer, graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has established herself as a critically-acclaimed professional photographer through a series of exhibitions both in Israel and abroad.

“These pictures are about death, rebirth, and survival. Indeed she addresses this concept in every picture, in a multitude of different ways. Stories, allegorical or real, of life rekindled, drive her portraits here.”
− Elisabeth Biondi