Shooting in the dark

Elinor Milchan launched her photography career at 25, after studying advertising and marketing and working in several advertising firms. But it's important to her to make it clear that she began taking pictures long before - when she was 12 and her father, Israeli movie producer and businessman Arnon Milchan, gave her her first camera.

	Elinor Milchan’s When No One’s Looking, 2009.

"It is such a part of me," she says. "Everything I do and everything I experience, I photograph and document in the end."

The Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv is currently exhibiting two series of photos by Milchan, who spent most of her adult life in New York and moved to Israel 18 months ago. The exhibit, which is called "Through the Looking Glass" and is open through August 13, features clean, minimalist, abstract expressions of urban landscapes in Tel Aviv and New York. It also includes collages that Milchan created since moving to Israel, some of whose themes are also expressed in her photos.

Though some of the photos were taken in Tel Aviv, the exhibit has a foreign feel. For instance, one of the photos features the Statue of Liberty, which is visible through fragments of English words. The absence of Israeliness is obvious to the viewer.

It appears that questions of belonging and identity help feed Milchan's work. She was born 37 years ago in Tel Aviv, the daughter of an Israeli father and French mother, the model Brigitte Genmaire. She traveled a lot in childhood and attended boarding school in Paris.

Milchan's professional background is also global in its reach. Her multi-screen video installation "Seven," so called because it focuses on light and the seven colors of the visible spectrum, is on permanent exhibit in the lobby of the Times Square Building, the former home of the New York Times. She has also exhibited three large backlit photographs at the 20th Century Fox Studios in Los Angeles, and co-founded Artea Projects, a group that works to bring contemporary art to the public.

Milchan has also worked with multimedia artist Uri Dotan to create the T Squared Project, which they call an "architectural video intervention" - a project in which architectural structures are covered in large-scale moving images reflecting Times Square. She has taken part in group exhibits at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and her work has been on display in New York's White Box Gallery and at the FIAC art fair in Paris.

'I sketch the world'

The collages in the current exhibit in Tel Aviv are a kind of window into the artist's soul and the formative processes of her work.

"Like a painter who makes sketches before she works on canvas, I too sketch the world. I frame the things I see in my mind and sometimes also with my cell phone camera," she says. "I have accumulated a lot of photos, sentences I've found or written, and I place them next to each other."

Milchan says there is no beginning or end to the artistic process, which takes place all the time, approaching her from every direction, and all at once. She says she is influenced by everything that happens in her life, including text messages and e-mails, what she sees on the streets and in magazines, and even the routine events of daily life.

The collages give Milchan's photos a third dimension. "Photography is two-dimensional and decidedly flat, and at a certain point I felt that I missed that other dimension," she says. "Through drawing and pasting, the work changes and turns into an object." Nonetheless, when she finishes a collage, she takes a picture of it, thereby flattening it and trapping it within photography's two dimensions.

While her collages are characterized by buoyancy and intuition, her photographs are more thought out, more old-fashioned, meeting their obligation to one of the most basic elements of photography: exposure to light. Milchan has previously written that painters like Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch and Picasso have inspired her to use the camera the way they used the paintbrush.

With the aid of her Hasselblad camera, ("I like the old-style, square format, that every photo is accompanied by the noise of the film moving through the camera, and that the photo is actually the light registering on the negative" ), she uses light to create her art. She doesn't use a flash, instead going for small, measured exposures of light in an attempt to catch time and movement in the frame.

"We think that we live in time in a linear way, but the brain and our senses do not operate linearly," says Milchan. All the same, she sees photography as creating linearity. This tension is what makes photography interesting to her, she says, because she aspires to create a sense of time and continuity.