Since the first day I held a camera, a feeling grew strong within me that photography is like drinking life without ever being full. Like a small child with no boundaries, creating another frame, another angle, one more statement that creates a parallel 'present time' with a different life. A present time rich with connections and dialogues that go unnoticed in our day to day lives. A different life with content and meaning, full of things the soul may feel but the mind ignores.
Life is made up of millions of fragments. Using photography I succeed in preserving part of them. My subjective view chooses which fragments to preserve and which to discard. This sensual experience is possible thanks to the camera's abilities – color, black and white, sharpness, fuzziness, depth etc.
As much as photography allows us to observe and understand our path in life, it also provides me with a subjective perspective of my own life. This is the tool with which I can explore the Eyal within me. Looking at my photos I see the person that I want to be.
Analogous to our souls, photography exists in the space formed between the sharpness and the fuzziness created by "gazing". Extracting the "beyond" - sharpening that which is blurry leads me to sharpening the connections within me.
The "click" imprints a fragment on eternal life, giving me a supreme feeling of creation. It begins with a strong urge to pick up the camera and capture something evasive, causing my eyesight to home in. The "click" at the end of the process is fed through hearing.
The end result is often powerful and amazing, though its source is unclear. What made me click at that specific moment? What made me pick up the camera in the first place? An impulse from within. After looking at the result I can understand and often times be surprised.
​Eyal Hirsch