Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv in 1967 and studied photography at the University of Westminster and the RCA. He is a professor of photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent. Gersht creates both still and moving images, which explore the tensions between beauty and violence, memory and history, and draw on sources ranging from 19th-century romantic landscape painting to the Holocaust.

Each photograph in the series Time after Time depicts a floral arrangement, based on a still life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) in the V&A collection. Gersht attached multiple tiny pyrotechnic charges to the petals and leaves; freeze dried them with liquid nitrogen, and then blew up the arrangement, filming the explosion in digital high resolution. The prints were created with ‘Light Valve Technology’ (LVT), in which digital movie imagery is transferred to conventional silver film transparency. The exposed film is developed and printed by regular photographic chemical processing. The still images taken from the film represent a moment of 1/6000 of a second. These freeze-frame images capture moments so brief they can only be fully perceived with the aid of photography, an occurrence that Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in his essay of 1931, A Short History of Photography.

Time after Time reflects upon the themes of death and decay, alluded to in traditional still-life and vanitas painting. However, Gersht’s process of destruction is more dramatic, violent, and compelling to watch. The series also comments upon the technical and aesthetic similarities and disruptions between different visual media, incorporating simultaneously traditions of painting, still photography and digital movie film.