Parallaxes — The Practice of Kobi Israel · Parallax House
Photography, moving image, writing, archives and sonic identities — four decades, one inquiry.
Not separate careers. Different instruments used across forty years to investigate the same unresolved questions about memory, image, identity, and what survives.
Begin Here
Four entrances, four questions.
Pathway I
What does memory preserve?
Letters, contact sheets, family photographs, recovered fragments — the raw material the rest of the work is made from.
Begin in the Archive →
Pathway II
What does the image conceal?
Monographs in still photography — Cuba, River of Three Crossings, Fragments, Intimate Strangers, Views — staged, observed, restaged.
Begin in Visual Works →
Pathway III
How many faces can one identity contain?
Parallax House and its sonic identities — distinct voices that share one body, each a different way of speaking the same questions.
Begin in the Sonic Universe →
Pathway IV
What survives when people, places and relationships disappear?
Essays and moving image — investigations into loss, queer survival, family, exile, and the long work of looking again.
Begin in the Writings →
One From Each Instrument
A cross-section of the practice.
Visual Works · Photograph
Anselm, Portrait No. 12
Paris, France / 1982
Writings · Essay
Evidence That We Were Here
Perhaps every photograph, every diary, every journey and every story ultimately attempts to answer the same question: what evidence will remain that we were here?
Moving Image · Video Essay
The Long Pause
A meditation on Chris Marker's still frames and the moments cinema chooses to hold still.
Sonic Universe · Heteronym / Sound & Image
Syntax of Paradox
An ongoing investigation into coded identity, queer survival and fragmented selfhood - staged across recordings, photographs and short films. Each release is a different mask worn by the same consciousness.
Archive · Photograph
Anselm, Portrait No. 12
Paris / 1982
Twelfth and final plate of the Anselm sittings, made in a borrowed apartment near the Canal Saint-Martin in late October 1982.
Open archive item →
The Letters
Parallax Letters
A periodic letter from the studio — new monographs, recovered archives, sonic releases, and notes on the work in progress.