Michal Chelbin

Strangely Familiar: Angelina with her Father, Israel

Michal Chelbin’s staged yet intimate portrait photographs, seduce the viewer into uncomfortable, voyeuristic complicity with the camera. Several works represent adolescent girls on the verge of sexual consciousness, their bodies still that of a child while their gaze directly confronts the viewer implying differently. Michal Chelbin shoots in a format of utter stability-the square. She positions her subjects well within the frame where visual clarity prevails. Angelina with her Father, Israel belongs to the Strangely Familiar series where Chelbin shifted from shooting in the studio to the outside world, from theatrical to found light. In this work, an athletic but vulnerable-looking man holds his daughter in front of a swamp, poised as if offering her to the viewer.

Though the photographs remain staged and her efforts directorial, Chelbin has sublimated the work’s mythic aspects by exploring a world of characters that lend themselves readily to the romantic-the world of athletes, ballroom dancers, and performers in small traveling shows and circuses, mostly in Eastern Europe, but also in Israel and England. With little supporting information to go on, we reflexively fill in the blanks and ride the images’ narrative momentum wherever it leads. Much of the time taking us to places steeped in discontinuity, incongruity, ambiguity. Places of subtle, underlying tension between the odd and the ordinary.