DAYA CAHEN

THE QUESTION IS ONLY HOW THE LIGHT FALLS ON IT

2016

When my aunt, Eva Lescovac, died in New York, I was allowed to choose some of her photographs. A series about the Middle-East drew my attentions, and for some years

a bag with these photographs has been sitting on my desk.

A landscape, a desert, a sea, a horizon; 'Israel'.

But when you look at the back of these photographs, you can see they were taken

in a year that the State of Israel did not exist yet,

and the country was still called Palestine.

For my aunt, who after fleading Germany in 1939, had once become stateless and adrift,

these were images of a seemingly safe place. For others, they are images of landscapes

that she, at the moment the light had hit the negative, had no rights to.

That makes me think of what the photographer Helmar Lerski said:

“die Frage ist nur, worauf das Licht fällt"

("The question is only, what the light falls on).

A research into territory via old family archival photographs, propaganda films stills

and video games.