Orit Raff

Untitled (Oven)

Orit Raff creates spare and intimate photographs, installations, and video works, focusing on themes of absence and memory. Raff's photographs in Insatiable, taken in an Israeli bakery, depict the various materials used in the preparation of bread. She explores the confluence and contradiction embedded in the Hebrew words for bread and war; "lehem" (bread) and "milhama" (war) are linked by their common Hebrew root, suggesting the tension between "life" and "war".

The artist's concern for personal and social survival is at the root of her images. Each photograph in "Insatiable", whether of stained aprons or an antique oven from Eretz Israel, is redolent with associations. It is difficult not to seize on the Holocaust implications in the striking image of the oven, and one can detect traces of human presence in the stains that remain on the aprons.

Orit Raff (born 1970) lives in New York
Untitled (Oven). from Insatiable series, 2001-4 (Chromogenic print)
Courtesy of the artist