In “Was It a Dream,” photographer Ayala Gazit goes to Australia to find out about her half-brother, who committed suicide in 1996 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
SVA Gallery
209 East 23rd St. between Second & Third Aves.
Through December 18
Admission: free
212-592-2010
www.schoolofvisualarts.edu
www.ayalagazit.com
Born in Haifa in 1984, Ayala Gazit was twelve years old when her father told her that she had a half-brother named James in Australia from a brief relationship he had with an Englishwoman named Linda in London. Gazit wrote James a letter introducing herself, but they never met, as he committed suicide later that year. After being awarded the Tierney Grant in Photography as a senior at SVA, Gazit used the prize, which gives promising graduating photography students one year to create an exhibition, to go to Australia and find out about the half-brother she never knew. She met with James’s mother and siblings, went through the family album, and scouted out the neighborhood where James lived. What she discovered, in words and pictures, is on view through the weekend in the somber yet powerful “Was It a Dream,” at the SVA Gallery on East 23rd St. Gazit, who was an intelligence photographer in the Israeli military for two years, groups together portraits of members of both families along with haunting individual shots of landscapes where James lived and played. To further the idea of home, one corner includes two chairs and a table on which sits an ashtray with a partially smoked cigarette in it, as if something has been left unfinished. There are few smiles in Gazit’s photographs, mostly serious looks contemplating a life cut short and what might have been. The pictures are supplemented with Linda’s letter to Ayala’s father telling him about the suicide, Ayala’s letter to James, and a slideshow of older family photographs.