The New Zero is an ongoing artistic project, which plays on the nature of photography and its ability to assemble and disassemble layers of history.

In 1999 Yaron Lapid found on the floor of a recently demolished area in Jerusalem, several envelopes. The envelopes contained hundreds of black and white photographs and negatives, which were probably the leftovers of a former photographic studio.

The artist has reprocessed the found material to create an atypical “family album”composed of moving portraits that fluidly fade into black before revealing their main features.
By reversing the conventions of documentary editing, the video focuses on marginal details such as body posture, clothes and accessories to suggest the habits and costumes of Jerusalem in the 70s, providing hints of the atmosphere of that time.

The loop reinforces the sense of a stratified past that cannot be pictured at once, but has slowly informed the layers of this multifaceted society. A society where formal differences often mark profound cultural oppositions.

These photographs, which have crystallized a particular moment of individual histories, form a visual archive whose gaps can be filled by the viewer’s imagination and inner projections.

(Adopted from a text by Gaia Tedone)