Rachel Neiman
October 31, 2014

Photographer Eran Yerushalmi categorizes himself as a surrealist photographer who is inspired by the art of Salvador Dali.

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In a new exhibit of photos, entitled “Fantasea”, Yerushalmi presents a heightened reality of Israel’s shoreline at sunset. Amazingly, all of this photos were taken “as is” with his iPhone.

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Within the phone-cam frame, Yerushalmi plays with perspective, depth of field and items like bubbles and balloons, wine glasses and goldfish.

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He also plays with found objects strewn on the beach.

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“I think that the iPhone has depth and angles that a normal camera can’t achieve,” says Yerushalmi. “I also shoot with a conventional camera but for everything art-related I’m much more connected to the ‘iPhone side’ of photography.”

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“All of the photos are authentic. I don’t change anything in the photo. As it is photographed so it comes out.  I just do a bit of ‘fine tuning’, as they say. Aside from that, I don’t change anything.”

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Also slightly surreal is the way in which Yerushalmi first came to public attention: he won an Instagram photo competition held as part of last year’s season of the popular reality show Big Brother. Yerushalmi’s winning image of a crumpled mineral water bottle was selected, according to Mako, “for creativity, originality and mainly for environmentally friendly recycling.”

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The location Yerushalmi picked for his current exhibition is the gallery at the Ramat Aviv Mall. Curator Ayelet Amorai-Biran notes that, “as the artist constructs a reality out of his imagination, in this context, it is related to surrealism”.

This video (in Hebrew) provides a glimpse of the exhibition opening earlier this month.

http://youtu.be/2ZSU6c5dF1Q

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