Manual Camera

Ori Gersht was born in 1967, but has lived in London for over 30 years. Throughout his career his work has been concerned with relationships between history, memory and landscape. He often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to exploring lore, the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories.

Gersht approaches this challenge not simply through his choice of imagery, but by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth. Frequently referencing art history, Gersht’s imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty and violence. This has included an exploration of his own family’s experiences during the holocaust, a series of post-conflict landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow motion films in which traditional still lives explodes on screen.