Yossi Breger

“I am interested in the environments and systems people set up for themselves, their flow and function. And when I see, I usually also photograph, mostly without any local elements. Much like Beckett’s stories: there’s a man, there’s a woman, there’s a hill, there’s a house, there’s a hat, there’s a walking cane—all of which are generic and skeletal, without any identificatory properties, and yet there is a statement in the compilation of all these places.”
“[...] I look for a well-constructed, even seemingly staged image, in real life—an image that has a pictorial quality and meaning. Things need to be composed in a precise manner, so that everything may have a distinct place in the frame’s order of things, and thus also in our mind and memory. When you see this image I would like you, the viewer, to think of all these classical categories, so that you may, through them, see a whole, a general model. Through the basic things you experience in daily life, I would like these categories to lead you to general, skeletal, somewhat abstract story, perhaps a surreal one, and construct everybody’s story of life—the “big picture.” What turns these things into a story is the feeling of the passage of time as you watch familiar places and objects. This generates a sense of observing the system, or human culture, through very specific representative details.”
Yossi Breger’s (1960-2016) installation aims to follow the process in which pictures accumulate into content, or into abstract yet simple, coherent system that articulates a surrealist and yet understandable story, which exceeds any specific thing, time, or place. All together, it creates a whole that defines a procedure, that becomes a model for a world in human proportion, which communicates an outline of the being, movement and thought of as if “everyone” in relation to the world and its “things”, culture and nature, to the general human system.
Yossi Breger’s standpoint, including his bodily stance, is eminently evident in each and every image he chooses to photograph, manifesting a combination of passion and reflection. In a formal language that is wonderfully precise, Breger composes a comprehensive, profonde model of the world and a story of life out of the elementary components of human environment and culture. Landscape, spaces, structures, objects and people that he photographed in different places around the world – Tel Aviv, Berlin, Cologne, Havana, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Beijing, Stockholm – join together to produce a clear, lucid image of the world, combining measured enthusiasm for zeniths of beauty with melancholy and awareness of the fragility and finality they entail. Breger’s gaze harmoniously embraces the personal and the public, life and death; it generates a pictorial and cinematic drama that is a superb depiction of a foundational moment in which, by standing in front of a thing, one captures the conceptual, personal, social and political aspects it embodies.
- Mordechai Omer, chief curator and director of TAMA (1995-2011)