Insomnia

The work of still photographer Tami Amit generates various shifts from what we know as staged photography. The scale of her work calls to mind cinematic and fashion productions, from which she extracts a discreet dimension which charges the images with qualities of horror; discreet due to the fact that this staged photography is not conveyed by the images themselves. Ostensibly, this is a replication of the Hollywood approach to the status of the camera, where the actors perform their roles as if there were no camera facing them. Unlike the Hollywood camera, however, the transparent presence in Amit’s case enables her camera to function as hidden, as if it were shooting out of a hiding-place. Moreover, Amit’s photography displays an affinity with moments of postconceptual art, such as the work of Cindy Sherman. In her Untitled Film Stills series Sherman concocted scenes from nonexistent movies, depicting herself as the heroine. In light of this affinity, Amit’s work – mainly photographs of women, usually one woman per frame in a scene from a film never made – may be regarded as the result of self-representation, especially female self-representation understood as fiction, with its entire range of performative aspects.