Michal Chelbin

MONOGRAPHS & CATALOGS

Michal Chelbin: Strangely Familiar Text by Leah Ollman. In her sympathetic pictures of contortionists, dwarves, ballroom dancers and wrestlers from small towns in Israel, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and England, Michal Chelbin offers a glimpse into worlds both strange and
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APERTURE
ISBN: 9781597110563
$45.00 | In stock

Sailboats and Swans There is nothing easy about it.

It is a constructed moment, a scene within a scene, the real within the unreal. They are moments, lunga fermata, suspensions of time in the midst of what might otherwise be unbearable.

The images are about a kind of discomfort—theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old fashioned staring contest—one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures—we shudder. A.M. Homes (Writer of controversial novels and unusual stories.)
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TWIN PALMS
ISBN: 9781936611034
$65.00 | Limited Quantity

Michal Chelbin

Michal Chelbin: Strangely Familiar

Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes

Text by Leah Ollman.
Published by Aperture

In her sympathetic pictures of contortionists, dwarves, ballroom dancers and wrestlers from small towns in Israel, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and England, Michal Chelbin offers a glimpse into worlds both strange and familiar. Her subjects--usually individuals on society’s margins--tend to be portrayed offstage, at home, on the street or in a park, and in a disarmingly direct engagement with the viewer: “My aim is to record a scene where there is a mixture of direct information and enigmas and in which there are visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, normal and abnormal,” she writes. This sense of candid confrontation between subject and camera is particularly disarming when those subjects are prepubescent girls, whose bodies, as Chelbin puts it, “might be still that of a child, [but] their gazes sometimes imply differently.” Chelbin’s palette is intensely saturated with distinctive pinks, blues and greens, evoking a painterly atmosphere, even occasionally making explicit reference to art history. Though her influences are evident--most notably August Sander and Diane Arbus--the compelling photographs gathered in this first monograph have a unique visual and emotional impact.

Sailboats and Swans

Published by Twin Palms

"There is nothing easy about it.

It is a constructed moment, a scene within a scene, the real within the unreal. They are moments, lunga fermata, suspensions of time in the midst of what might otherwise be unbearable.

The images are about a kind of discomfort—theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old fashioned staring contest—one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures—we shudder." — A.M. Homes (Writer of controversial novels and unusual stories.)