Real Summer
2024

In the summer of 2001, I returned to Tel Aviv after living in New York for a while. In my suitcase, I brought a digital camera. Free from work and obligations, I wandered around the city photographing everything Tel Avivian that I had missed - beach sand, rooftops against blue skies, peeling walls, friends, and random people. 

This year, 2024, I accidentally stumbled upon a forgotten folder on my disk containing that pile of photographs from back then. The photos looked wrong to me. Not accurate. Not good. Many things I clearly remembered weren't there. I remember being surprised by the sheer amount of antennas and electrical cables everywhere. I distinctly remember a sense of dark happenings behind the scenes, some kind of deal brewing unbeknownst to anyone (I landed in Tel Aviv exactly on the day the Twin Towers fell, which I had left behind). Even the composition, form, and the color of light and shadow - everything in the photos wasn't right. 

I took it upon myself to photograph again, using artificial intelligence, the memories from that summer, but this time as they truly were. The new photographs also started with innocent landscapes - a roof against the sky, a paddleboat on the beach. But I found myself drawn more and more to images where the ominous undercurrent finds its way to the surface, as it did then and as it has returned now.


Real Summer was part of my exhibition “Passion for the Real”  at the 
The Martine de Souza-Dassault Gallery, curated by Dr. Michal Mor
© Supersize | Matty Mariansky