Etty Schwartz

Stone Mirrors (2013-present)

The horizontal photography reveals how political borders, which seem so absolute in the present, are merely a fleeting line across a geological continuum spanning millions of years - sedimentary rocks, tectonic fractures, and ancient outcrops that fossilized long before anyone thought of dividing the land with artificial borders.

Born in Jerusalem, my physical journey with the camera through these landscapes - from the Jerusalem mountains to the emerging city of Rawabi - becomes an act of searching for identity through the lens. Using a panoramic Hasselblad camera turned vertical, the act of photographing becomes simultaneously an act of looking and scanning - the vertical format allowing me to move through the landscape while the panoramic lens captures the horizontal sweep of geological time. Each photograph is taken from a body that carries Jerusalem within it, documenting the layers of belonging and displacement that define this place.

When I gaze through this vertical panoramic lens at the landscapes of the Judean Hills, the contemporary political reality - with its seam lines, planted forests, and new settlements - appears as a thin layer on the surface. Beneath it, like in Borges' stone mirrors, lie deep layers of geological time.

Borges' stone mirrors resonate here in a double sense - both in the reflection of contemporary reality on the surface of ancient limestone rocks, and in the deep time buried within them, a time that recognizes no temporal boundaries of states and peoples. The vertical panorama allows us to see both these layers simultaneously - the temporary and the eternal, the political and the geological, what seems permanent in our eyes and what truly remains.

Plantings (1998-2016)

Every Tu BiShvat, the Festival of Trees, we would go out as neighborhood children to plant trees in the valley between Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Ze'ev in northern Jerusalem. What began as a festive tradition of planting young pine trees became over the years a landscape that appears almost European, despite its precise location on the border between mountain and desert.

I returned to photograph this place over nearly twenty years, watching the young forest grow and transform the character of the location. The tender trees evoke excitement, yet it's difficult to ignore the political irony behind them. This area is part of the seam line surrounding Jerusalem, a contested zone where the establishment of new Jewish neighborhoods penetrates areas inhabited by Arab residents, thereby changing the city's demographic boundaries.

The photographs, taken with a 6x7 format camera in both color and black and white, document the process by which a seemingly innocent act of tree planting becomes a tool of landscape appropriation and place identity transformation. The young forest, growing on the border line under the unforgiving Israeli sun, creates a hybrid landscape - a European forest in a Middle Eastern reality, planted nature replacing original nature, beauty that conceals political complexity.

October (2023-present)

The roads between Tel Aviv and the south became familiar paths during those months when my twin sons served on the front lines. What began as urgent journeys to meet them during brief respites from combat gradually became a photographic practice - a way to process the unbearable and document a reality that words could barely contain.

Shot with a 35mm camera, these photographs trace the landscape of worry and waiting. The act of photographing while driving these routes served as both shield and witness - a method of coping with the impossible distance between safety and danger, between home and war. The camera became a tool for survival as much as documentation.

Even after their military service ended, I continue to photograph these journeys. The roads hold memory; the landscape carries what we lived through. These images speak to the particular geography of fear and love that defines a country where the distance between everyday life and conflict can be measured in kilometers, and where every parent knows these roads by heart.

Grid

These are camera-less photographic works created by scanning stacks of empty slide mounts with black tape used for negative scanning. The process transforms the technical act of digitizing film into a form of creation itself.

The resulting works function as digital photograms, where the scanning apparatus becomes both subject and medium. The various format squares of the slide mounts create a grid of empty spaces - absences that become presences, voids that generate form. Each scan captures the accumulation of these transparent frames, their black tape borders creating geometric patterns that speak to the architecture of analog photography.

In this process, the tools of preservation and conversion become the artwork itself. The scanner, designed to capture what exists, instead documents what is missing - the photographs that were never taken, the images that these frames were meant to hold. The grid emerges not from intention but from the systematic logic of photographic formats, creating a meditation on the empty spaces that define the medium as much as the filled ones.

Domestic Science (Ongoing Series)

"Domestic Science" is a broad title for a collection of photographs, each one a spontaneous response to daily life connected to my preoccupation with light as matter. In the encounter between light and everyday reality, rare moments of transformation turn insignificant instances - moments that are neither events nor particularly important - into moments that hold essence and discovery.

I work like someone responding to phenomena of light and matter, but the practice is absurd - more poetic than systematic. These photographs contain the contradictory element inherent to the photographic medium: the physical magic alongside simple human documentation. Together, I feel these images carry meanings from the quantum realm.

The camera becomes an instrument for detecting the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary - the way morning light transforms a kitchen counter into something otherworldly, or how shadows cast by household objects create temporary shapes that exist for mere seconds. Each photograph captures these fleeting moments where the mundane reveals its hidden nature.

Shot with various cameras, primarily a Minolta 35mm and Sony RX100 digital camera, this ongoing series documents the daily space of domestic life, where light continuously plays with matter, and I serve as both observer and participant in these quiet revelations.

Catastrophic Points

After interviewing scientists at the Weizmann Institute, I learned about the phenomenon of caustics - where light rays converge through curved surfaces, creating points of intense concentration. The scientists explained that at these focal points, the mathematical description of light intensity approaches infinity - a kind of optical singularity that pushes against the limits of measurement. In catastrophe theory, these are called "catastrophic points."

This series explores light not merely as beauty, but through the lens of radical quantum physics that reveals the world is not as we actually see it. Light exists simultaneously as particle and wave, and most of its reality lies beyond our senses. Using a 35mm camera with macro lens on analog film, I photograph crystal glass objects against sunlight to capture these ephemeral moments where light concentrates into these catastrophic intensities.

The choice of grainy analog film creates a deliberate tension - the rough, tactile surface of the photographic material confronts the ethereal forms of pure light. This collision between the material grain of the medium and the immaterial nature of light phenomena becomes part of the investigation itself.

The crystal objects themselves carry their own history - decorative glasses and dishes made from crystal glass, typically from Central European countries like Romania, where my family originates. Though I was born in Israel, these inherited objects connect me to a displaced European aesthetic tradition. Now they serve as optical instruments, transforming family heirlooms into tools for investigating the fundamental nature of light.

Each photograph attempts to document the undocumentable - those catastrophic points where light becomes something else entirely, where the measurable world dissolves into pure optical phenomenon captured on the grainy surface that makes visible what should remain invisible.

The Periodic Table - The Hidden Properties of Worthless Objects (Ongoing work between 1998-2022)

Photography chemistry studies at Hadassah College opened a window for me into the world of elements. I discovered that the chemical bond lies at the heart of the photographic creation process. I didn't settle for mere photography, but made the development processes an integral part of the creation itself. When I became a teacher, I continued to pass on my love for chemistry and the magic of photography.

The obsessive tendency toward photography and contemplations about what is worthy of documentation led me to collect and photograph remnants and objects on their way to the trash: corks, soaps, and household waste. I was particularly drawn to round objects.

The first photographs were an attempt to convert the state of aggregation of solid materials through photographic properties. I photographed them against a white background, on grainy black-and-white film, in diffused natural light without shadows. Some photographs were taken with sharp brightness and abundant materiality, while others - with intentional exposure errors designed to dim the material properties and create an illusion of a gaseous or ethereal state of aggregation.

The periodic table is more than just a catalog of elements. The number of electrons in the atomic structure of each element affects its properties and its ability to bond with other elements in the processes of material formation in nature. In fact, it is the key to understanding material properties and their organic characterization, and made it possible to identify properties of matter without even knowing of its actual existence.

The question of sorting and editing the photographs led to the idea of adopting the periodic table model. I decided to sort my object photographs according to similar logic, creating a unique comparative system. The table associatively compares organic essence and basic existence properties, so that each axis represents opposites: dead/alive, black/white, whole/damaged, clean/dirty, new/old, pure/impure, solid/gas, present/dissolved, and more.

Viewing the photographs along rows and columns allows a single look at each "element" while simultaneously comparing along the axes of opposition. The arrangement of photographs moves from massless to smooth, and from there to the complex marked by time. The adaptation to the model is associative, and the comparison is visual, tracing the change of form everywhere in the table.

Parallel to investigating the essence of matter, a philosophical insight arose in my mind about the connection between the behavior of elements in forming chemical bonds and the world of human relationships. I found a way to bridge between scientific systematicity in explaining phenomena and questions of existence and perception.

The phenomenological phenomena between subjects, the micro and macro, led to the action of cataloging objects and creating a reading based on a table that converts matter to its aesthetic values. This is a cataloging system with comparison of opposites and stages of change influenced by time and space.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a closed system, the amount of entropy tends toward maximum - the sum of molecular bonds creates entropy. Ironically and dialectically, the opposites, the lack and absence, the displacement and erosion will ultimately lead to balance. The table is balanced in its entirety, but not in its parts.

In the journey seeking the essence of matter, I discovered a whole world hidden beneath the surface. Suddenly I understood that every atom - exactly like human beings - seeks to belong, to connect, to form relationships. Like in a complex dance of human relationships, chemical elements also form alliances, separate, unite, and change one another.

I felt as if I had discovered a great secret: behind every mathematical formula and chemical reaction hides a deep human story. Science, which seemed so dry and cold, revealed itself to me as a profound language of relationships, interdependence, and complexity. I found myself looking at the periodic table like a map of souls, where each element represents a human type with its strengths and weaknesses.

Public Gardens

In her "Public Gardens" series, Schwartz explores the tension between wild and cultivated ornamental nature. Through her lens, she examines tropical plants that retain their "wild" and exotic appearance while existing within carefully designed and civilized public spaces. These botanical subjects—originally jungle plants that have been transplanted, domesticated, and cultivated as ornamental specimens—embody a cultural-botanical boundary where the natural and the designed merge. The work questions what constitutes "natural" when a plant is inherently organic yet displaced from its native environment, capturing the moment where wilderness memory persists within urban Israeli culture.