Home Sweet Home

Israeli photographer Rubi Lebovitch has a sort of subversive sense of humor, and for the record, we love it. Though his photographs themselves are pretty straightforward, Lebovitch has the uncanny ability to find the absurd in the ordinary. There’s a great cerebral quality to his work, in which the viewer is not guided by a predetermined story arc, but instead can deduce any number of things from his unexpected and beautifully absurd work. For his series Home Sweet Home, Lebovitch utilizes an intimate domestic setting for a veritable fun house. There is a certain charm in Lebovitch’s hyperbole, and ironically enough, you too can display it in your own home in a tidy coffee table book (available here). In his own words, Lebovitch discusses his book: “My photographs deal with domestic scenes captured in straightforward images…characterized by mystery, vagueness and absurdity. I create a twist in familiar sights and build new contexts, thus endowing the scene with new meanings. Mundane objects and domestic spaces are transformed into something strange and surprising. My images do not contain a clear-cut story or plot. The characters are inscrutable to the viewers and difficult to identify; their relationship with the world around them is senseless and they fail to communicate. Rationality is substituted by a twisted and exaggerated worldview. I employ a multiplicity of objects, allowing the objects to grow stronger and take over reality; they occupy and control the space. The scenes depicted in the photographs emphasize what usually remains hidden: the repressed, which cannot be described. The anxiety these scenes arouse undermines the peacefulness and security usually associated with home.”

Via rubilebovitch.com and loeildelaphotographie.com