Gender, Race, and Class in Dafna Shalom`s Social Photography Project "Identity & Identify"

In 2012 Israeli artist Dafna Shalom produced the social artistic project "Identity_Identify" in Jessi Cohen neighborhood in Holon. In the industrial center of the neighborhood the artist opened a "photography station" with a photography studio and a scanner to collect and preserve family and historical photographs of the residents. Shalom invited the residents to be photographed and to scan their photos in order to create a local archive in a working class Mizrahi neighborhood. By creating the local archive Shalom is leading a political gesture, a gesture that will include Mizrahi and Ethiopian culture in the national narrative. The artistic intervention will expose and voice the community she identifies with and which is often erased from the national narrative. In the lecture I will highlight a series of photographs from the archive she created and will stress that in addition to the cultural-political gesture Shalom also imbeds political subtexts in every portrait she took. I will analyze selected photographs and pull out ideas about the transition from institutional representations to self representation of Mizrahi culture in Israel. Such transition is situated in the junction of gender, race and class in Israeli culture.