Shoot to capture

Ruth Biger aims to frame fleeting moments.

By BARRY DAVIS
Ruth Biger aims to frame fleeting moments (photo credit: Courtesy)
Ruth Biger aims to frame fleeting moments
(photo credit: Courtesy)
People who prefer to take a more peaceful view of life may find the idea of “shooting” a subject abhorrent. Then again, if you are wielding a camera rather than, say, an M16 rifle, the worst that could happen is you capture your prey unawares – and the end result is a bit more aesthetically pleasing.
The creative-militant shooting analogy is front and center in Ruth Biger’s intriguingly named new exhibition, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” which opened at the P8 Gallery on Yehuda Halevy Street in Tel Aviv last Thursday, and will run until July 5.
In fact, Biger has been aiming her artistic and intellectual gifts all over the show for some time, and has become quite adept at leaping across disciplinary and professional fences. Her initial bona fide channel of artistic expression was through the medium of sculpture, before she switched to photography.
All that came in the wake of an entirely different daytime job.
“Actually, I worked as a lawyer for a few years,” she states matter-of-factly.
While that might seem like quite a giant professional leap for most, Biger says she just went with the emotional flow. “I didn’t stop to think about giving up law for art. I just listened to my heart and went for it,” she notes.
Naturally, Biger had harbored creative intent for quite some time. “I was always taking pictures, even when I was very small,” she recalls. “Before I had a camera, I was always taking pictures with my eyes, figuring out how to frame subjects. Then I had all sorts of cameras.
“I have always lived my life through my eyes. I have always been drawn to the visual.”
Once she made her mind up that photography was her thing, she went for it in the most serious way she could – registering for an arts course at the Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba and juggling motherhood with furthering her child was born around that time, and I didn’t take a degree as such – I did as much as I could as a first-time mother,” Biger explains.
She came out of college with her sights firmly set on becoming a fulltime sculptor. “I focused on sculpting, and ceramic sculpting, in my studies.
That was what I felt I wanted to do, although one of my teachers told me I was more of a photographer than a sculptor. He clearly noticed something I wasn’t yet aware of.”
Biger feels the two fields are not really that different. “They both involve envisioning an object in space, and I think they really have some strong parallel lines.”
She got herself some studio space, but soon realized that teacher was right– and that photography was her artistic calling. She received the requisite nudge in that direction when she came across a contact print of a picture her sister had taken of Biger when the latter was seven or eight years old.
“I looked at the print and instinctively knew there was more feeling and meaning to that picture than I could ever produce from the hundreds of kilos of clay I’d use to make sculptures,” she says. An enlargement of that photo, and another her sister took of Biger, appear in the The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter exhibition.
It was a surprising conclusion to reach. After all, sculpting is such a tactile art form, while photographs are taken through the use of technologically advanced apparatus. “Photography captures a fleeting fragile moment in time. It is such a genuine point in existence; a second later the subject looks different,” notes Biger. “It is a moment that never returns. I see these moments with my eyes the whole time, and I capture some of them with my camera. I am fascinated by that.”
Biger also feels that her current vehicle of expression rings truer for her.
“With sculpting I always felt that I somehow hid behind whatever I was making, but with photography I don’t have full control over what I capture.
I press the button, but I can’t possibly know exactly what I’ll get.”
Obsessed, rather than fascinated, might be a more accurate description of Biger’s bond with photography. “I walk around with a camera a lot. It really hurts me to see something I wanted to shoot if I don’t have a camera with me.”
Biger feels there are therapeutic benefits to be had from her craft. Notwithstanding the sense of release she gets from taking a photograph, without being able to accurately foresee the end result, she says that her camera cushions her from the drama that everyday life can throw up at her, and keeps things, for her, in their rightful place.
“Sometimes an experience can be overwhelming, and the camera can protect me from the emotional effect in certain cases. It helps me to maintain some order in the world, and to organize things the way I want – the way that makes me feel comfortable and in control.”
The works in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter cover a wide range of subject matter and aesthetic qualities. In addition to the two childhood portraits of the artist, Biger presents us with a couple of portraits of a woman who might be a refugee lost in a new world, but could equally be a highly spiritual person using some ESP powers to fathom life around her.
Then there is the “Midnight Blue” series of somewhat risqué shots of models taken from a fashion TV channel.
The grainy, stripey pictures add a sense of mystique to a subject which could tend towards sleaze.
“There was a show with girls modeling underwear in all sorts of erotic poses,” Biger recounts. “I was attracted to the eroticism, the loneliness, their vulnerability and the fantasy element.”
There is also a picture of a speeding train that seems a bit out of context, compared with the other works in the show. “I was strolling around near the source of the Yarkon River when the train suddenly appeared,” says the artist. “It was very close up, real and fast. I like the way the image of the train in the shot became a little abstract.”
“I just take pictures of what I see.”
For more information: 050-861-6601, www.p8gallery.net