Jungle
Through photography, Itamar Freed, crafts hyper realistic representations of portraits and landscapes. His ongoing body of work features habitats from across the globe, questioning the distinctions between the natural and artificial, real and manufactured. Images of landscapes, natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoos and the artist's studio are combined to create an array of fictitious places that exist only within the photographic frame. The encounter between the three territories – the wild, the cultured and the staged – creates intriguing scenarios and instigates questions around aesthetics, politics, culture, boundaries, and reality.
In his recent works, Freed considers man made ‘natural’ landscapes within urban metropolitans. These microcosms provide visitors with embodied experience of foreign climates and vegetation, through an artificial experience that is both similar, and yet vastly different, to the habitats which they aims to imitate. Freed constantly questions and challenges notions of western representations of exotic environments and the artificial depiction of places outside of our normal spheres. He considers how these notions are perceived by presenting scenes such as dioramas and greenhouses. The final works attempt to alert the viewer to the dissolving of two seemingly separate categories - nature and culture.
From Freed's point of view, photography is an axis between painting portraiture and reality—in other words, between pictures of actual individuals, which were all created manually and are therefore fictitious, and actual, real people.
Freed asks questions about the ability of the photographic medium to preserve, to freeze and to grasp life and nature to create a dream like space, that could not exist in reality. The photograph is a token, a sentimental relic of something that cannot be viewed.
