Studio photographer and visual artist Elisheva Gavra creates art which challenges the boundaries of realism; explores the power of spirituality; and investigates the dynamic experience of questioning discord. The latter is a concept with which she has familiarity, growing up in a small Israeli town subsumed by a strong sense of cultural identity and framework. During the pandemic, she paralleled a focus aimed at exploring manifestations of what it means to manipulate reality, which she had experienced photographing others, to herself in a series of self-portraits created during a quarantine in her bedroom. We discuss these topics through the lens of what led up to works like In Procession, Self-Portraits and Eyes, among others in her new studio (which is rather old) in New York City. A Columbia MFA candidate, she received her BA in Art History and Gender Studies from Tel Aviv University, and completed her professional studio photographer training at Studio Gavra.
Opening Credits: Matte Black - 1969 I Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); Closing Credits: Forget the Whale - 10 Days I Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)