Yael Eban
Yael Eban
False Lighthouse
Hardcover
17.2 x 22.9 cm
104 pages
Meteoro Editions
2019
About the Book:
False Lighthouse: a false coastal light (or the extinction of a light) which lures ships onto rocky shores. Nautical legend has it that wreckers deliberately decoyed ships onto coasts using false lights so that they crashed ashore for easy plundering.
Comprised entirely of found photographs from the Peter J. Cohen Collection,False Lighthouseis artist Yael Eban’s layered examination of photography’s material and metaphysical attributes.
The design of this book pays homage to Virginia Woolf’s seminal workTo the Lighthouse, a novel which functions almost as a psychological poem, straining against the restrictions of traditional narrative and playing with our perceptions of time. Woolf described the structure of her novel as if it were a letter H, or “two blocks joined by a corridor.”False Lighthouse, too, exists on parallel planes, with the two essays at the center by Leah Ollman and Anna Lee bridging the divergent photographic narratives that flank them on either side.
Texts by Anna Lee & Leah Ollman
This publication was made with the support of Peter J.Cohen Collection
Book review by Dana Stirling |
In this book, Yael Eban explores the essence of what photography is all about – how images can create a new meaning, shine a light (pun intendent) on how a visual narrative can shape shift based on how the artist connects it all together to create a coded language of images.
As an avid lover of found snapshots myself, I found this work to be so captivating, inspiring and whimsical.
Maybe because we live in such a modern and technologically advanced world, we see more and more artists go back to some of the roots of photography, to the “simplicity” of its beginnings and the start to when we just started to discover and explore what this new technology had to offer. Many artists are using these found images as inspiration and source material, as the core of their conceptual representation of modern photography. These old images always have a sense of nostalgia, regardless of their subject matter in my opinion. The fact that we know that they are old vernacular snapshots, immediately frame them in a very specific way that we cannot escape, nor should we. I think a big part of the appeal of these images is their anonymousness. Who took these images? Does it even matter? Why were they taken? And I think more importantly then anything – why were they discarded or left behind unclaimed?
This allows the artist to step into this void and start filling it with their own message, meaning, concept, life and vision.
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
In this work, Eban focuses on the subject of Lighthouses or more over, the notion of false lighthouses which lures ships onto shore for them to crash on the rocky rocks in order to take the valuable from the shipwreck. However, although many storis of such occasion exists, they are usually seen more as a tale. Keeping this in mind, it almost makes absolute sense to use found vernacular images. As this is a legend, using images that are removed from any concrete “reality” helps elevate this concept of a tale told with images.
What makes this book so brilliant, and captivating is how Yael uses these images to tell this story. She is able to manipulate the images in such a way that makes them seem both hyper realistic but at the same time, so removed from anything specific that they are able to tell a convincing story that is completely fictional. I think it is amazing that we are able to see a historic tale of these lighthouses with so little information, but the way the images are weaved together, tell the story so beautifully.
You would think that this book is just filled with old images of lighthouses, but of course, you would be completely wrong. This book focuses on the story as a whole, it is the shore, the water, the light, the day, the night, the ship. This is not an illustrative book of what a lighthouse is, this is an emotional representation of what it means to be lured by these false lighthouses.
In this book, Yael is a curator as much as she is an artist. The choices of which images, paired together or standing alone, cropped, or zoomed in are all decisions that are curatorial in nature. This is the power of the work. This is what makes this work more than just a collection of found images.
I hope this review sparks something inside of you and convinces you to take a deeper look at the work and getting a copy for yourself - you won’t regret it.
Image courtesy of the artist
