Shai Ashkenazi
Black-and-white photograph: Light and shadow on rippling dark water

Live with photography

Some photographs aren’t meant to stay inside a screen.

They are meant to live with us.

To become part of a room.

To be passed every morning.

To reveal something different as the years go by.

A selection of photographs from my archive is available as signed fine-art prints.

Produced in limited editions using museum-quality materials.

Made to live longer than the screen they were first seen on.

View the collection   Collectors

A morning in Jerusalem holds more than one morning.

Until it is noticed, it could still be any of them: another face, another stair, another light.

Then something is seen, and all the others quietly stop being possible.

A photograph is how we keep the one that happened.

Black-and-white photograph: A man in a prayer shawl climbs stone steps in a narrow alley, beneath a street lamp and a sign reading Plugat Hakotel St.
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[Year], Jerusalem, Sukkot
Edition
Limited edition of 36 + 2 artist’s proofs
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

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The stone is mostly emptiness, held together by a pull we never see.

So is almost everything we love.

Solomon’s Pillars have outlasted every name given to them, and they will outlast this moment too.

What a moment can do, standing here, is remind us how little holds anything together, and how much a single glance can hold.

Black-and-white photograph: Looking up between two walls of sandstone at a tall rock column, with a narrow strip of sky above
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[Year], Solomon’s Pillars
Edition
Limited edition of 36 + 2 artist’s proofs
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

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How much of what we call empty is only waiting to be noticed?

The desert is the most honest teacher of this. Nothing here performs, and still the silence is full of motion: heat leaving the stone, light changing its mind.

You do not find anything out here by searching. It arrives when you stop asking it to.

Black-and-white photograph: Ridges of eroded desert hills in the foreground, a dark dry riverbed below, and flat-topped mountains in the distance
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[Year], Sde Boker
Edition
Limited edition of 36 + 2 artist’s proofs
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

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[Story: to complete]

Black-and-white photograph: A white swan on dark water, its wings raised in the shape of a heart
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[To complete]
Edition
[Limited edition of N, or open edition]
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

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[Story: to complete]

Black-and-white photograph: The sun just above a dark hill, its light reflected on rippling water
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[To complete]
Edition
[Limited edition of N, or open edition]
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

Inquire about this work

[Story: to complete]

Black-and-white photograph: A man leaps on a slackline between palm trees at sunset, in silhouette, while people watch below
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[To complete]
Edition
[Limited edition of N, or open edition]
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

Inquire about this work

[Story: to complete]

Black-and-white photograph: A figure in a prayer shawl walks away down a dark, blurred alley toward a bright light
Title
[To complete]
Year, place
[To complete]
Edition
[Limited edition of N, or open edition]
Print
24 × 36 in, [paper, framing]

Inquire about this work

Collectors

One size: 40 × 60 in. Edition of 18 + 2 artist’s proofs.

A covenant is an agreement that outlasts the people who made it.

Even stone is one: mostly empty space, held in place by a trust between forces we never see.

We keep standing before such things to remember that we, too, are part of the agreement.

Black-and-white photograph: A lone figure in a prayer shawl stands at the foot of a vast wall of ancient stone blocks
Title
Covenant
Year, place
2015, Jerusalem
Edition
Limited edition of 18 + 2 artist’s proofs
Print
40 × 60 in, [paper, framing]

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Belonging is rarely a decision. It is what stays behind after enough shared moments.

Things that have once been close are never entirely separate again.

Perhaps that is all home is: the people who still move with you, long after the game is over.

Black-and-white photograph: Silhouetted people play with balls on a wet beach at sunset
Title
Belonging
Year, place
2019, Tel Aviv
Edition
Limited edition of 18 + 2 artist’s proofs
Print
40 × 60 in, [paper, framing]

Inquire about this work

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