Obstructed Views
Charlotte Cotton
Dafna Talmor's photographs radiate with the light from the windows onto which she focuses her camera within simple and anonymous modern interiors. Perhaps light passing through a window seems like a slight subject for a photograph. Or maybe even too large a subject given its implicit symbolism as the act of photography understood as the result of light passing through the glass lens of a camera. But Talmor has found a way of making the potential non-subject of the falling of light the substance of what we see by the appearance of the female figure (herself) turned away from the camera and looking into the light. One analogy for the visual device that Talmor uses is to think of landscape painting and the way that human figures have traditionally been used. They act as not only the key to the scale of the depicted scene but also as the guide where the figure looks, we are directed to find the visual narrative. Talmor twists what we might expect to be the object of the figure's and our gaze onto what we are more likely to hold at the peripheries of our vision - the window perceived as a boundary between interior and exterior space - that Talmor recognises as a rich subject in its own right.
Charlotte Cotton, 2004