Page 93 - Art-Professionals

Tami Amit’s work is that of an extraordinary, impressive in an uncomfortable silence where a sense of danger
and disquieting photographer of women. Fragile, fearful, is omnipresent. But from what, from which scenario, in

overcome (by the sorrow or by the pain?), romantic which film, are the women photographed by Tami Amit
and excessive, dispassionate, worried or remorseful, the heroines? And what are they waiting for? What is
the women that Tami Amit photographs carefully and the object of their silence?
intuitively are always captured in a dazed, dreamlike The strange and cruel interplay between the photographer
state, expressing solitude, waiting and abandon… An and her models is particularly resonant in two different

introspection of appearances is invented. sequences, Untitled and The Butcher, recalling the eerie
In the Hotel Boutique sequence a young brunette’s figures in Villiers’ L’Ève Future or the mechanical woman
intense gaze seems to challenge the photographic lens, in Fellini’s Casanova, evoking the world of Mary Shelley.

offering an uncertain welcome or perhaps a defiant Dread and the fantastic intermingle, Tami Amit’s women
stare. A room appears to replicate something of her are immersed therein. Towards the end of the book, the
mental world, the décor of her dreams furnishing a women’s apparent solitude and desperation might be
backdrop to her enigmatic desires. The bed sheets construed as self-portrait (the last sequence is entitled
are crumpled, a mirror is visible, and the walls appear The Woman Who Was a Replicant), or perhaps the artist

like monochromes bringing her body into sharp relief. offers a more contemplative conclusion in the desolate
Throughout, Tami Amit’s meticulous attention to snowy landscapes of The Winter, and the verdant
detail in lighting renders the colours of her images world of lost paradises in The End of Innocence. These

intense, harmonious and dynamic, full of contrast, are endings, but they are also new beginnings… Tami
otherworldly, strange and discomfiting. In this series, Amit’s photographs are a magnificent journey through a
quiet impatience and apparent calm give expression labyrinth of tragic female emotion, solitude and fantasy.
to the inner sensations of desire, waiting and tedium,
verging on a possible rupture. Time appears suspended, The Introspection of Appearances by Alexandre Castant

Alexandre Castant is an essayist, art critic and lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Bourges (France) where he teaches
contemporary art history and aesthetics. Castant has written extensively in the fields of art, literature and sound creation. In 2014 his
collection of essays, Écrans de neige: photographies, textes, images (Snow screens: photographs, texts and images), was published by
Éditions Filigranes. Translated from the French by Rachel Robertson.

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