Art and Transformation
Sacred Photography
June 21, 2009 by Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi · Leave a Comment
Sacred Photography
Eyal Ben Dov *
A review of the art work of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi
“While I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.” ( Ezekiel 1)
In exile we sit and already are waiting, and here these photos are coming opening the skies to vision divine images. Photo-art mandalas that describe supreme heavens, shapes and forms of spiritual architecture, of angels in infinite geometric transformation. In an electronic computerized loop, leading us to the spirituality of the 21st century.
Shadai visions
“The Animals sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.”
The photo-art works of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi are visual prayers that require ecstatic and transformative meditation. Visual sublimation of body photography to spiritual structures that mark sacred chambers, like the Chambers Literature in Kabala, this chambers photography shows us an alter-reality in spiritual spheres.
Sometimes it seems like we are observing the Tantric sculpturing of the temples in Khajuraho in India. It is said that the artists of Khajuraho knew the erotic sacred text of the Kama-Sutra. The Kama-Sutra of Ohad Ezrahi is such a text; an erotic poetry emerging from the temple of King Salomon, and from the Merkabah visions of Ezekiel. A visual Song of Songs.
Photography is connected to reality in the way that it is present in front of a landscape, a body, face and object, an ultimate recording of reality. Through digital form transformation the object becomes a subject, the analog reality sublimes into virtual reality and spiritual substantive. In my eyes photography is the most pure medium of plastic art. What painting had been for centuries became photography. Modern painting leading to modern photography creating a post-modern digital imaging. Like sampled and duplicated Trans music, trans-photography duplicated, cut, passed, enlarged, colored, emphasized and mostly – transformed.
“Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.”
The sacred art of Ohad Ezrahi mark an ancient- new path for art – art that is connected to ancient rituals in pagan Gods and Goddesses, through mysterious gothic cathedral stain glass, Indian mandalas for mediation and up to dreamlike surrealist montages unveiling the optic subconscious, wild and weird and elucidative.
It is interesting to imagine those works becoming stain glass in the temple of the renewing Hebraic Tribe.
“This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the YHWH. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking.”
* Eyal Ben Dov is a senior lecturer in the department of photography in Bezal’el art school in Jerusalem, a curator and a photographer.
