Youth 2014

This series of photographs formulate a part of Berlowitz' Youth project, also comprising of 16mm films. The photograph Youth reveals a budding bodily awareness. The group of five young adolescents is seen in a slightly parched open field on a bright fair morning. Standing in their underclothes, they are looking at an indeterminate spot afar. Like ‘a camera’ the photograph seem to expose a moment of organic and mental crystallization. A mature spatial perspective is built by the distance Berlowitz defines between her camera lens and her subjects.
The persistent transitional quality, already a signature of Berlowitz’s work, lay emphasis on the active dimension inherent in photographs, the fact that they are not passive objects. Not only do they compel us to look at them, to wonder what they are about, to hold them or talk about them, but their striking beauty also works to motivate us to action, to alter our perception and modify our behavior in some way. Rather than simulations, they act as radical visual means conveying the understanding that photographs can be, as defined by Charlotte Cotton, fundamentally experimental and not merely the photographic result of experimentation.[1] The delicate fragility of Berlowitz’s photographs echoes the nuance necessary for creating change, thus making change possible.

[1] Charlotte Cotton,  December 17, 2012 (9:14 pm), comment on Kelly Wilder, "Reflections on the Effect of Photography on the Sciences", The Fotomuseum Winterthur Blog,  Permalink.