בֵּית בּוּבּוֹת רִאשׁוֹן

First Dollhouse

First Dollhouse (from Leftovers), 2025
Digital Collage, 160 cm x 73 cm

At the core of “First Dollhouse” lies the violence of the gaze – an unauthorized intrusion, a violation of the private and the personal. The destruction revealed here consists of sliced buildings, open houses, abandoned rooms that survived. Beds, kitchens, bathrooms, bookshelves – all the things meant to remain private and intimate – are laid bare for analysis, for viewing, for the looting gaze.

The idea of addressing this theme within the framework of Leftovers has occupied me since October 7th. In the weeks following the massacre, dozens of photographers – some professional photojournalists, others amateur thrill-seekers – poured into the devastated communities. They entered private homes left unguarded, without permission, without consent, without reflection – a frantic rush to build portfolios thick with ruin. They invaded children’s rooms where murders took place, bedrooms where men and women were raped, abducted, slaughtered. They photographed with appetite: scorched walls, pools of blood, bullet casings, shattered glass, destroyed belongings. We all saw hundreds of such images.

Susan Sontag wrote that there is something predatory in the act of taking a photograph. To photograph people is to violate them – to see them as they can never see themselves, to turn them into objects that can be symbolically possessed (Sontag, On Photography). But what about the private spaces these people left behind? What about the personal objects? Did those photographers stop for even a moment to consider that their intrusion was a continuation of the original violation – by other means?
Who has the right to look inside? Can such permission even be given?

In “First Dollhouse”, I shift Leftovers from public catastrophe to private space. Using digital tools, I penetrate the imagined private space of an absent “other” – whether they once existed or never did. Like an open architectural model, the work creates the illusion of control over catastrophe. But this is an illusion. The fabricated leftovers documented here offer no real access to lived experience — only an excess of exposure (or perhaps a deficiency?) of what remains. The tension at the heart of the work lies between documentation and voyeurism, between the urge to preserve memory and the violence of intrusion.