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Family Portrait
2016

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In 2016, I set out to document my family—my siblings, their spouses, and their children. 71 nuclear family members.

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At its core, portraying them was an attempt to find ways to reconnect after more than a decade of distance and the thunderous silence that had settled between us since I ran away from home and the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in.

 

Daring to look back at the past, seeking reconciliation with both my family and my former self, was only possible through the selective, shield-like protection of the camera.

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I asked each of my siblings to visit them at their homes and explained the technical details of photographing each one, along with their family members. Some were willing to participate, while others asked to sit with their backs to the camera, and some refused altogether. In those cases, I chose to represent them in the family portrait with a solid color sampled from their iris.

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In 2016, the project included 71 portraits of all family members. In 2019, I tried to repeat the family portrait, but with little success. Then, in 2025, the 100th and 101st grandchildren of my parents were born in the same week, leaving me with an urgent desire to portrait my family once again.