Elisheva Biernoff: Elsewhere

“As a child, I loved looking at my parents’ old photo albums because they could bring me face to face with people and places from the past.... [But] I wanted to know more than a photo could possibly record and deliver. That tension—connection tinged with deprivation, a contact that constantly recedes—continues to draw me to old snapshots.”

—Elisheva Biernoff

All quotes featured throughout this page are from Biernoff’s recent written artist statement.

“My work for the last fifteen years has centered on an ongoing series of small paintings based on anonymous found snapshots that I collect.... They are simulated artifacts, re-created front-and-back as truly as possible down to the smallest smudge or inscription. I’m interested not just in the imagery, but also in the photograph as an object, as something that can be held and turned over.”

“In painting found photographs, I become absorbed in one instant of someone else’s life, something deep, individual, and specific, but also something I relate to, that’s open and universal. The project started out of an impulse to rescue these mysterious and sympathetic castaways that are so small, and so full of poetry.”

“In choosing a photograph to paint, I always look for an element of the unexpected, something that comes at beauty sideways. Sometimes that takes the form of an unusual vantage point or shift in focus, while other photos reveal overt mistakes in the photography or development process: fading, light leaks, emulsion lifting off. The interruption afforded by these outtakes intrudes so completely on the picture that it becomes a subject in its own right.”

“The paintings are slow and quiet and take many months to make. Unlike the original photographs, with their bursts of chance, everything in the paintings is purposeful, meticulous. However, technical fidelity for its own sake is not my goal. The goal is to create a moment of perceptual doubt.... I want the experience of seeing them to be slightly disorienting, like meeting a twin—familiar and unfamiliar at the same time—so that it jounces you, and asks you to look again.”