The photos - of landscapes, buildings, spaces, objects, people - tell a story of being in front of a thing, the fundamental things that form the infrastructure of human environment. They are precise and thoughtful, articulated in pictorial, emotional and classical formal language; their accumulation creates a general conceptual model of a life story and a world, time - space relations constructed by light and revealing a personal and sensual touch with elements of nature and culture.
Space in Breger’s works – unlike the space photography is expected to reflect does not seek to document a place, and yet it steers clear of any effects that would demonstrate it as “other” or “abstract”; first and foremost, this space traces movement in the world, at times capturing a clear image, sharply seen, in a practical, almost formalistic structural composition.
Arrays of contrasting light and darkness, of rectangular forms that turn into sources of luminosity, of road and dark tunnel imagery, imbue the works with symbolist and romantic undertones, even with spiritual connotations. In this hybridization of symbolism and formalism or of romanticism and rationalism, however, the former is always subjugated to the latter, contingent upon it, present as a mental possibility that has no corroboration or actual hold on reality. One of the most unmistakable characteristics of Breger’s photography is the ability to extract from the world elements that are experienced as fundamental without being encumbered by excessive symbolism.
Yossi Breger (b. France, 1960), recipient of the 1996 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, is a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design MFA Program and Department of Photography, which he headed during 2000–2006.
