Yoav Horesh: Aftermath

As scholar Tina Campt argues, photographs are not mute. They’re quiet and implore us to listen. Yoav Horesh’s show Aftermath, comprised of 30 16 x 20-inch silver gelatin prints, has much to say about trauma, violence and collective memory, and it speaks to us in whispers.

Between 2002 and 2005, Horesh—who grew up in Israel and lives in Manchester, NH—returned to his childhood home to photograph the sites of over 120 suicide bombings. It is the absence that gives these unsentimental photographs of cafes and street corners power. Sunlight streams through hotel curtains. The padded chairs and white tablecloth could be any vacant hotel conference room. In contrast to the bloody, chaotic photographs seen in the media, Horesh’s black-and-white images capture the subtle echoes of terrorism after shattered windows have been replaced and burned-out buses hauled away.

Yoav Horesh, Sbarro Pizzeria, Jerusalem, August 2003, gelatin silver print, 18½ x 14¾”. Courtesy of the artist.

Horesh was a student in Boston during 9/11 and was struck by how different the American response, with its grounded planes and makeshift memorials, was from his own experiences in Israel. While the American impulse was to “never forget,” Israel’s urge was to erase. (Though curator Kristina Durocher sees a parallel between “America’s response to mass shootings as a new societal norm” and the “cultural fatalism” in Horesh’s photos.)

The ghostly reflections in a Sbarro window gesture at what can’t be seen. There are no monuments here, as Horesh explains, because there would be a plaque on every corner. If Lee Friedlander’s The American Monument is a testament to monuments hiding in plain sight, Horesh’s Aftermath, also a book, is a mournful dirge for trauma swept under the rug in the name of “normalcy.”

By evoking the uncomfortable gap between violence and the collective “cleanup,” Horesh leaves us space to contemplate. Who was the bomber? Who were the victims? What butterfly effect has been set in motion?

Aftermath nods to the traditions of street photography, photojournalism and the archival impulse, as well as photo books like Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site and The American Monument. Yet unlike Friedlander, Horesh can only capture the hum of ghosts. To paraphrase Robert Frank, Horesh’s compassionate eye listens before it looks.