Formally Speaking

Amit Berlowitz

The basic structure, recurring in all the photographs, alludes to Richard Long's A Line Made by Walking, England, 1967, through a grassy field, with fundamental differences: For each photograph, Amit Berlowitz chooses a different location, one in which the composition is bisected by a path or a road, where she positions a different female figure. While Long's line-made-by-walking is associated with English Romanticism and the English landscape, as well as with the conceptual, which is masculine, Berlowitz's photographs softly melt the distinction between conceptual and feminine. The look of 1970s art is blended with that of glossy magazine photographs.      

One teenage girl was photographed on a road in Fabas, a sequestered area in France; another-on a dead-end road in Belle-Île, France; and the young girl was photographed in a grove adjacent to Jerusalem. The teenager in Fabas draws toward the viewer in a series of photographs generating a walk in stop-motion; the young woman in Belle-Île writes sentences on a little board and erases them; and the girl in Jerusalem stands upright, looking into the camera with the utmost naïveté and the brittleness typical to her age, at the verge of puberty.

The walkways along which variously-aged women are placed acquire existential symbolism of their own: the acts of walking and stopping, looking ahead or hiding one's face, and, of course, the writing and erasing of sentences which are real contemplations about life, even when they sound cliché.

Born in the USA, 1970; lives and works in Tel Aviv