- The Library
los libros de la biblioteca no tienen letras
cuando los abro surgen
library books have no words
when I open them they come up
Jorge Luis Borges
As an Argentinean immigrant in Israel I had to struggle with life in a place where an unknown language is spoken.
I started taking pictures of every page of my Spanish-Hebrew dictionary, as if their pages were a world through which I could travel, or a beautiful body to discover, and whose meanings would be revealed to me through the light.
In the midst of this exploration a very strange thing happened: one day I found about twenty abandoned books in the street. They seemed to be part of the same library because they were printed in German and most of them were valuable 19th century editions.
I included these books in the process, while I continued rescuing more books from the street, the beach, or even from the garbage.
I photograph them, looking for the emotional and sensory experience in the simple act of opening a book, knowing that there will be a meeting, a memory, a journey or a mirror, even in a language I can't understand.
Most of the books I have gathered were published in the first half of the 20th century, with some from the late 1800's. They have come from all parts of the world, and they are printed in English, French, Spanish, Italic, German, Russian, Romanian, Polish, Hebrew and Arabic.
Over the past four years, a strange and special library has taken shape, where classic and unknown authors coexist, and which includes theatre, novels, essays and dictionaries; philosophy, psychology, poetry and music.
I focus on their spatial and visual coordinates: their open pages, covers, shapes and textures, type of paper, the typography or their printed language with the aim to reveal through my images some fragment of the book's own story and its quality as a conjunction of matter and spirit.
Even if the books will not be read, as a photographer, I prepare myself for the act of reading, in a kind of open dialogue of discovery and revelation.
While more books have become virtual, and many prophesize their disappearance as we know them today, it would seem that I am following an inverse route. Nevertheless, I believe, as Tomás Eloy Martínez wrote that the book will endure with the same shape it assumed more than five hundred and fifty years ago, because someone will always prefer or rather will choose to establish an intimate relationship with an author in this manner, through pages gaining life while they are being opened.
Liliana Gelman
Haifa, spring 2006
