The artist Dana Lev Levnat was born in 1978 in Haifa; she is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Photography Department, as well as the Bezalel master’s degree track. In 2013, she embarked on her “Permanent Vacation” photography project, leaving Israel to travel the world. The project is founded on one Levnat’s unspoken rules, whereby she is dutybound to post images on social media every two hours, and every image must document one moment of her last 24 hours. The project tracks countless subjects photographed daily by Levnat, and photographs not posted online are then added to a growing archive. The panoply of images this artist presents gives the impression that she photographs everything as she sees it. The camera is her means of testifying to every perception emerging in villages, cities, or along any path she traverses. However, this mass of images also creates a paradox – there are so many, it seems there will never be time enough to view them all, truly see them. This contradiction is conveyed forcefully in the project title – a “permanent vacation”, a clear impossibility in today’s economic reality.
Dana Lev Levnat supplies a quiet, daily stream of images – buildings, gardens, local cuisine, or portraits of the characters around her, such as the residents of the hostel she spent time in. With a title that escapes imagination, she creates an entity that is everlasting, inconceivable. Attempts to grasp this journey, always in segments extracted from the entire array, are an alert or reminder to viewers that this time without end is a part of life and can therefore be perceived by everyone through their own eyes.
CONTACT
levnatdana@gmail.com
www.instagram.com/permanenttvacation
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Permanent Vacation
The first time I came across the name Permanent Vacation was on Instagram, with an image of the woods in snow. Under the white glace carpets, the pines, in deep colors of green and brown, were a bit blurry. At a second glance I noticed a reflection; the picture was taken through a glass, and the window composed the image’s frame. The sky in the background were under fog. It was wintertime.
The image was an enigma to me. I did not know anything about Permanent Vacation. I did not know who was behind the Instagram account, where the photographer is going, what was the destination of the train. I imagined, instead, that this is a lady traveling in the Trans-Siberian train, and is currently passing through Russia. I did not know anything, and as I was going through my day to day present, the image was on my mind; the cold air, the colors of sundown, the train symbolizing the junction of the machine and nature, and far away was an eye looking at that view, clicking on a camera.
The power of the image made me look up Permanent Vacation, as I was first and foremost eager learn whose eyes are behind the image, and maybe to therefore decipher the paradox of its name. I have seen beautiful images before, but to me, besides intriguing imagery and aesthetic composition, Permanent Vacation was more than anything a paradox, written with an impossible name which is a blunt juxtaposition, a dream not only impossible to be attained but to even be dreamt, a mere science fiction.
I found an article explaining this oxymoron. The name behind these eyes is Dana Lev Levnat. An artist, a woman, traveling the world. But Levnat is not your usual travel photographer. Her Tumbler or Instagram feed do not list recommendations and must see-s. They are not based on images of famous monuments, routing suggestions nor travel advice. Not promoting anything or anyone, and barely taking pictures of herself, Levnat is not taking the pictures that you will. Certainly, Levnat is not the only person who decided to leave the modern work force and travel the world instead. However, she does not write a blog advising fellow travelers how to reach each village, city or continent. She, in fact, does not write to anyone at all.
Levnat does not take pictures from her travel for tourism purposes. It is as if she is telling a story of cities and villages without knowing what is the location in subject. Her stories are told with the words of her photographs; the names are irrelevant. With a balanced, symmetrical gaze, you are witnessing a moment, a look, a perspective. Time and space does not matter. The story thus written is not linear, there is no tale; the images do not cry however they are neither silent - they speak to you in a calm voice, depicting reality, telling the story of life itself. Scrolling down her website or her social media accounts, there is no hierarchy between the images; none is made to be dramatic, there is no crescendo, no winning picture. Sincere and blunt, her photographs are taken as a way of looking, of seeing. More than a photographer, it seems that Levnat is an observer, a wanderer.
Malte Lauridius Brige, the narrator of the German Poet Rilke’s book, is strolling around imaginary Paris. He is asking us, “Can you see it?” testifying “I am learning to see” or “I am beginning to see.” The images of Permanent Vacation seems to be shot as the eyes blink; they portray instances of an anonymous stroll in the anonymous town. A stand of pineapples in a market; a pair of high heeled, anonymous shoes; a pile of mangos. A woman in a pink T- shirt is sitting by her pink house, surrounded by a garden of pink, red and violet flowers. Can you see it? Who knew such beauty existed?
The images are simple - they portray no triumph nor battle.
But their great power is the mere acknowledgement that shall Permanent Vacation was not there, never they could have been taken, never that beauty would have been seen. The woman would never have been looked at by people from across the globe; the fruits would have been solely seen as excess goods, to be purchased before they are too ripe; the shoes would have been held in a closed closet far away. The fact that the images are context- less and that neither text nor explanation are attached to them, brings forth to our habitual reality something invisible. Perhaps this is due to the distance they are taken from, away of central or western areas; perhaps it is the fact that they present a tedious routine of a woman, outside any capitalist economy. The foreign, cryptic language of Permanent Vacation’s images create a magic like poetics.
The common person knows and learns about far destinations from highly circulated images found in Google image search, blogs, designated websites, from travel books, newspapers, magazines or famed testimonies. Permanent Vacation presents an opposition to common travel photography: her images collect the useless, the niche, the esoteric. Portraits of elderly man and woman, empty streets, colorful and colorless houses, food served in plastic plates, dorm rooms with standard bunk beds, trains, buses, airports. Her images are rare because they depict a road not taken by somebody but a road taken by nobody’s.
The Permeant Vacation project is comprised of countless images, that even Levnat herself admits to be too many for her to count. Impossible so see in their entire scope, the images cannot be remembered, creating a near infinite. Albeit the value arising from the fact that she is presenting rare beauty, even though she made us see the beauty of the woman in the pink house and garden, how can we apprehend and comprehend the oeuvre of Permanent Vacation? This fact enhances the meaning of its name; as it is linguistic oxymoron, a contradiction, it is presenting the impossible Atlas, never to be conceived. Though there is an image of anything and everything, the images are not informative, they cannot be taken down to a word, an idea, a title, a structured, methodological archive. What the viewer is left with is an air, a feeling. This is the poetics of the everyday.
Here lay the significances of the project; these are the images of our days, of today. Permanent Vacation presents a reality more real than ever, as it sheds light to what is usually in the shadow; the nobody might not have a name but she or he have a face – they were seen, there is proof. It is irrelevant if this truth will be ever searched, if it will have actual, factual value. It is a humble reply and an echo to Rilke, replying, endlessly, “Yes – I can see it”. It may be that this magic is hardly noticeable for the common viewer, the user of social media where hundred million images are uploaded every day. The different sides of the globe are presented without a blunt exposure, without an event, arising no shock, no knowledge nor moral, almost with no author. This is photography taken like breathing; no beginning, no ending, no time table, no time frame. No seasons, no quotidian divisions, no borders nor language.
It is possible that none of this was ever seen before, it is possible that it will not be seen ever again. And this is its tale, Permanent Vacation is a paradox of life, visible/invisible, which also describes the paradox of the image of reality. It is a conscious look on life, constantly asking, as Rilke, can you see it?
Elinore Darzi
Tel Aviv, Summer 2018
Read more...
The image was an enigma to me. I did not know anything about Permanent Vacation. I did not know who was behind the Instagram account, where the photographer is going, what was the destination of the train. I imagined, instead, that this is a lady traveling in the Trans-Siberian train, and is currently passing through Russia. I did not know anything, and as I was going through my day to day present, the image was on my mind; the cold air, the colors of sundown, the train symbolizing the junction of the machine and nature, and far away was an eye looking at that view, clicking on a camera.
The power of the image made me look up Permanent Vacation, as I was first and foremost eager learn whose eyes are behind the image, and maybe to therefore decipher the paradox of its name. I have seen beautiful images before, but to me, besides intriguing imagery and aesthetic composition, Permanent Vacation was more than anything a paradox, written with an impossible name which is a blunt juxtaposition, a dream not only impossible to be attained but to even be dreamt, a mere science fiction.
I found an article explaining this oxymoron. The name behind these eyes is Dana Lev Levnat. An artist, a woman, traveling the world. But Levnat is not your usual travel photographer. Her Tumbler or Instagram feed do not list recommendations and must see-s. They are not based on images of famous monuments, routing suggestions nor travel advice. Not promoting anything or anyone, and barely taking pictures of herself, Levnat is not taking the pictures that you will. Certainly, Levnat is not the only person who decided to leave the modern work force and travel the world instead. However, she does not write a blog advising fellow travelers how to reach each village, city or continent. She, in fact, does not write to anyone at all.
Levnat does not take pictures from her travel for tourism purposes. It is as if she is telling a story of cities and villages without knowing what is the location in subject. Her stories are told with the words of her photographs; the names are irrelevant. With a balanced, symmetrical gaze, you are witnessing a moment, a look, a perspective. Time and space does not matter. The story thus written is not linear, there is no tale; the images do not cry however they are neither silent - they speak to you in a calm voice, depicting reality, telling the story of life itself. Scrolling down her website or her social media accounts, there is no hierarchy between the images; none is made to be dramatic, there is no crescendo, no winning picture. Sincere and blunt, her photographs are taken as a way of looking, of seeing. More than a photographer, it seems that Levnat is an observer, a wanderer.
Malte Lauridius Brige, the narrator of the German Poet Rilke’s book, is strolling around imaginary Paris. He is asking us, “Can you see it?” testifying “I am learning to see” or “I am beginning to see.” The images of Permanent Vacation seems to be shot as the eyes blink; they portray instances of an anonymous stroll in the anonymous town. A stand of pineapples in a market; a pair of high heeled, anonymous shoes; a pile of mangos. A woman in a pink T- shirt is sitting by her pink house, surrounded by a garden of pink, red and violet flowers. Can you see it? Who knew such beauty existed?
The images are simple - they portray no triumph nor battle.
But their great power is the mere acknowledgement that shall Permanent Vacation was not there, never they could have been taken, never that beauty would have been seen. The woman would never have been looked at by people from across the globe; the fruits would have been solely seen as excess goods, to be purchased before they are too ripe; the shoes would have been held in a closed closet far away. The fact that the images are context- less and that neither text nor explanation are attached to them, brings forth to our habitual reality something invisible. Perhaps this is due to the distance they are taken from, away of central or western areas; perhaps it is the fact that they present a tedious routine of a woman, outside any capitalist economy. The foreign, cryptic language of Permanent Vacation’s images create a magic like poetics.
The common person knows and learns about far destinations from highly circulated images found in Google image search, blogs, designated websites, from travel books, newspapers, magazines or famed testimonies. Permanent Vacation presents an opposition to common travel photography: her images collect the useless, the niche, the esoteric. Portraits of elderly man and woman, empty streets, colorful and colorless houses, food served in plastic plates, dorm rooms with standard bunk beds, trains, buses, airports. Her images are rare because they depict a road not taken by somebody but a road taken by nobody’s.
The Permeant Vacation project is comprised of countless images, that even Levnat herself admits to be too many for her to count. Impossible so see in their entire scope, the images cannot be remembered, creating a near infinite. Albeit the value arising from the fact that she is presenting rare beauty, even though she made us see the beauty of the woman in the pink house and garden, how can we apprehend and comprehend the oeuvre of Permanent Vacation? This fact enhances the meaning of its name; as it is linguistic oxymoron, a contradiction, it is presenting the impossible Atlas, never to be conceived. Though there is an image of anything and everything, the images are not informative, they cannot be taken down to a word, an idea, a title, a structured, methodological archive. What the viewer is left with is an air, a feeling. This is the poetics of the everyday.
Here lay the significances of the project; these are the images of our days, of today. Permanent Vacation presents a reality more real than ever, as it sheds light to what is usually in the shadow; the nobody might not have a name but she or he have a face – they were seen, there is proof. It is irrelevant if this truth will be ever searched, if it will have actual, factual value. It is a humble reply and an echo to Rilke, replying, endlessly, “Yes – I can see it”. It may be that this magic is hardly noticeable for the common viewer, the user of social media where hundred million images are uploaded every day. The different sides of the globe are presented without a blunt exposure, without an event, arising no shock, no knowledge nor moral, almost with no author. This is photography taken like breathing; no beginning, no ending, no time table, no time frame. No seasons, no quotidian divisions, no borders nor language.
It is possible that none of this was ever seen before, it is possible that it will not be seen ever again. And this is its tale, Permanent Vacation is a paradox of life, visible/invisible, which also describes the paradox of the image of reality. It is a conscious look on life, constantly asking, as Rilke, can you see it?
Elinore Darzi
Tel Aviv, Summer 2018
Read more...
