Photographer Eran Yerushalmi categorizes himself as a surrealist photographer who is inspired by the art of Salvador Dali.
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.
Within the phone-cam frame, Yerushalmi plays with perspective, depth of field and items like bubbles and balloons, wine glasses and goldfish.
He also plays with found objects strewn on the beach.
“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.”
“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.”
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.”
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.
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