Dana Lev Levnat

Dana Lev Levnat

Dana Lev Levnat was born in 1978 in Haifa, she is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Photography Department, as well as the Bezalel master’s degree program.
In 2013, she embarked on her “Permanent Vacation” photography project, leaving Israel to travel the world. The project is founded on one unspoken rule: Dana must post images on social media every two hours, and every image must document one moment of her last 24 hours. The project tracks countless subjects photographed daily, and the photographs that are not posted online are then added to a growing archive.
Dana’s prolific imagery gives the impression that she photographs everything as she sees it. The camera is her means of testifying to every perception emerging in villages, cities, or along any path she traverses.
However, this mass of images also creates a paradox: there are so many of them, it seems there will never be time to view them all. This contradiction is conveyed forcefully in the project title, a “permanent vacation”. In Israeli culture, this is a clear impossibility considering the current economic reality.
Dana Lev Livnat supplies a quiet, daily stream of images: buildings, gardens, local cuisine, or portraits of the characters around her, such as the residents of the hostel she spent time in. With a title that escapes imagination, she creates an entity that is everlasting, inconceivable. Attempts to grasp this journey, always in segments extracted from the entire array, are an alert or reminder to viewers that this time without end is a part of life and can therefore be perceived by everyone through their own eyes.