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Issue link: https://fairweathermagazine.epubxp.com/i/144159
career when I was six years old. But, it was music. I learned music for 16 years. I am a musician. I don't know if today children are so lucky. When I was two years old, I broke everything around me. Everything that I saw I pulled out from the table, even if we were having a nice Shabbat dinner with a beautiful tablecloth and glasses. P: Some parents might have sent you out into the desert. R: My parents asked me, 'What do you want to play?''' And I said drums. My parents went to tour America and during that tour they brought me a drum set from Disneyland with Mickey Mouse; it's one of my frst memories of my life. And then I stopped breaking things. P: How long did you continue with the music? R: All my life. I still play, much less. My main instrument is a vibraphone. P: And did military service stop your music studies? R: Yeah, it stopped. After the military, I came to New York for a little bit. P: Were you doing photography then? R: I started photography when I was 14. P: What were you photographing? R: Everything around me. When I was 13 or 14, I started to look through the camera. Not doing really serious stuf. I don't have anything that I can be proud of that I shot at that time, but I started to be more interested in the technical part, looking through the camera. I did some musical tours in Germany, Italy, and America. We had organized tours and I photographed from one city to another. Today everyone is holding a camera, because the devices are so available. The way I started using the camera is unusual. My cousin has (motor neuron disease)…you know, Steve Hawking? It's a disease in the muscles. After a certain amount of time, it doesn't let you live. Steven Hawking is the oldest living person with this disease—ever. Nobody stayed alive so long with that disease, and my cousin is the second after him. He's 55, and he got ill when he was 25. And they are best friends and they are both an inspiration for people. They cannot move, but they can chat. When it was the beginning of his illness, I was 13, and at that age I started to photograph. Nobody really understood what he had, but he had difcultly moving. A friend of his, a photography teacher, brought him a camera and taught him about the camera. He couldn't go out. He couldn't hold the camera by himself, so the family built him a tripod. So in this way, he could move with the wheel chair and the camera would move with him, but he couldn't put the camera on the tripod. I was the smallest cousin in the family and I visited him a lot, and I was the one that installed the camera on the wheel chair. This is the beginning of me looking through the camera, preparing him to use the camera. I had never looked through a professional camera—and when you look through a professional camera, everything looked diferent, and this is the real beginning of my photography interest, which is a story bringing a story. Because we have a camera that my grandfather carried through the war—an old Russian camera—when I was a child, I couldn't touch it. "Don't touch the camera." It was my father's watch, my father's camera. I couldn't touch. This is from your grandfather and he carried it for the cause. So, it's a camera story and when I started to look through 'My work is more like I'm writing something that I have in mind— an idea, a concept.' Top: Light of the Dark N 11, 2006. Cibachrome manual print, 47x70 inches (from Genesis Bereshit series). Bottom: Light of the Dark N 5, 2005. Cibachrome manual print, 47x70 inches (from Genesis Bereshit series). the camera of my cousin, I went back home and started to touch the camera of my grandfather to touch the history of my family. P: Is there a connection with your family through your camera? Have you taken pictures with your grandfather's camera? R: Yes, they are interesting. It's an old camera and the photographs have a unique texture. I still have it. P: Would you ever show those photographs? R: No. I didn't have a unique eye at that time. I was just examining. My work is very philosophical. Sometime it's based on instinct, particularly at the moment, but most of the time it's conceptual—a strong idea behind. My work is more like I'm writing something that I have in mind—an idea—a concept, which the passion comes when I'm dealing with the concept. The concept brings the FAIRWEATHER | SUMMER 2013 | 49