Orit Raff
Orit Raff
Orit Raff was born in Jerusalem in 1970, and she lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Raff creates spare photographs, installations, and video works, which suggest intimacy, the private self, and evoke memories of our earliest experiences. Raff favors the implicit over the explicit. She follows traces and signs of a place or a time with her camera, wishing to give life to a frozen memory and to construct a narrative from vague fragments, left behind as a present absence: the marking of furniture in an abandoned space, signs engraved on school desks, or ice accumulations in an empty household refrigerator.
Raff also creates photographs of environments with cultural, sociological, and political dimensions. In her latest series of works, “Priming”, she gathers information that crosses cultures, locations, and periods, allowing her to discuss the medium of photography and its complex relation with the world of phenomena and documentations. In a unique technique of constructing photographs without the process of photography, Raff offers new possibilities for the ongoing discourse of simulation and its reference to reality, to imagination and fiction. This hybrid genre combines pure documentary photography with carefully staged photography, in a process that does not require a camera yet mimics a photographic site that is closely related with the act of photography.
The starkness of Raff’s imagery aesthetically links her work with Minimalism, but her references to common everyday life and objects also suggest a Pop sensibility.
Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard College. She participated in group and solo exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Forum des Images, Paris, School of Visual Arts, New York, Julie Saul Gallery, New York, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA Paula Boettcher Gallery, Berlin, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, Texas.
