For Each Time
I Wanted to Leave

"...The influence of photography on reality gains momentum and is actualized in a series of five photographs titled For Each Time I Wanted to Leave (2011). These are photographs of flowers in which the artist’s highly developed aesthetic sense, which guides the photographs’ compositions, stands out. The title of the series reveals her secret and simultaneously recalls the children’s ritual of tearing out flower petals while alternately reciting “he loves me” and “he loves me not” until the final petal provides the fateful answer. The photographs rely on the process by which they were created during which the artist tore out petals and dismembered flowers of various sorts, reducing them to their components. She then used glue to attach the various parts of the flowers (petals, stem leaves, stems, blooms, and so on) so as to form a new flower. For each flower a vase, a fitting background, and an appropriate color scheme were carefully chosen, and these are depicted in the final photograph. For example, the photograph For Each Time I Wanted to Leave #6 portrays two long stems capped by the flower of the Calla Lily. From the calyx of the flower emerges a baby corn that replaces the spadix (the phallic part) of the flower. The two flowers are placed in a pink porcelain decorative vase against a background that looks like the corner of a room painted in pink, white, and beige. Unlike the landscapes in which she combined separate realities to create a fake photograph, in this series, the artist creates a fake version of a familiar reality and makes use of straightforward photography. Elbling maintains her own discourse regarding the credibility of photography, and she demonstrates two possibilities for confronting aesthetics with ethics: a fake testimony regarding real occurrences or an accurate testimony regarding fake occurrences."

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From: Attacks on Photography,  By Ron Bartos

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Heb