Episode 38 - Student Interview: Whispers of the Ancients

Photographing Israels hidden diversity through war

Speaker: To make a fine art photography book you usually need, you know, a pristine studio, perfectly controlled lighting, and well, a massive budget,
Speaker 2: right? Yeah. Like a whole controlled environment.
Speaker: Exactly. But to create the book we're looking at today, the photographer actually needed a geopolitical evacuation plan.
Speaker 2: Wait, seriously. An evacuation places.
Speaker: Seriously, we are talking about five years of dodging. Burning tires. Navigating literal war zones. Oh yeah. Surviving a global pandemic on top of that.
Speaker 2: Wow. I mean, that sounds less like a fine art project and more like, I don't know, a high stakes anthropological survival mission.
Speaker: It really does. And honestly, looking through this incredible stack of sources you sent us for this deep dive, I. That is exactly what it was. She was photographing everyday people who didn't even realize they belonged in a museum.
Speaker 2: Right. And since you brought us this fascinating material today, our mission is to really unpack this extraordinary interview transcript between the renowned photographer Matthew Jordan Smith, and his student Kaela Ellis.
Speaker: Yeah, so welcome to the Deep Dive everyone. We are digging into Kala's Monumental Project, which is a, um, a 360 page photo book titled Whispers of the Ancients, A Visual Expression of Time and Culture.
Speaker 2: It's just a massive undertaking.
Speaker: It's huge, and right off the bat, I wanna make something very clear to you, the listener.
Speaker: This is not just a collection of pretty pictures designed to sit quietly on a coffee table.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely not.
Speaker: No. This is an intense, gritty journey across. 22 different locations in Israel and it completely shatters the, you know, the geographical and cultural stereotypes most people hold about that region.
Speaker: The sheer grit required to pull this off is just staggering.
Speaker 2: Staggering is definitely the right word for it, but you know what really anchors this entire discussion isn't just how physically difficult it was to print a book.
Speaker: Right. There's a deeper purpose here.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's about the underlying function of the art itself and why visual history is so critical.
Speaker 2: C is actively preserving these cultural whispers,
Speaker: whispers of the ancients, like the title says.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because these are transient, incredibly fragile histories that can and honestly often do vanish entirely if someone doesn't take the time to. Physically document them and pin them to a map.
Speaker: I wanna trace the momentum of this because the origin story of this massive historical document is just wild.
Speaker 2: It really is. It's not your typical art world story.
Speaker: Not at all. It doesn't start with a giant grant or a museum commission or anything like that. It literally starts as a homework assignment,
Speaker 2: which. Crazy to think about,
Speaker: right? Like how does a routine photography class snowball into a 360 page international artifact?
Speaker 2: Well, it's the ultimate overachiever trajectory really. So going back to 2019, Cella was enrolled in a photography lighting course with Matthew Jordan Smith.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker 2: And the assignment was incredibly straightforward to shoot a portrait that reflects who you are. So she decides to photograph a friend of hers who originally hails from Benin, and she styles her as an African queen.
Speaker: The execution of this single shoot is where you really start to see the genius.
Speaker 2: Oh, for sure.
Speaker: Because when you look at the final image, which by the way actually became the cover of the entire book, and it's printed on page three 30, you'd assume she had like a full Hollywood costume department,
Speaker 2: right? It looks so opulent.
Speaker: But she didn't even sew the garments. They took raw fabric, literally just wrapped it and pinned it directly onto her friend right there in the moment.
Speaker 2: No sewing it all just pins.
Speaker: Just pins. They added a gold turban. They captured something so deeply striking that it just demanded a bigger canvas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the technical choices she made in that specific moment are what allowed the whole project to scale up later, a friend actually encouraged her to think bigger than a standard eight by 10 print, suggesting she create these massive wall sized pieces of art,
Speaker: which is a huge leap.
Speaker 2: It is. But luckily Kala shot this image on a Nikon D eight 50,
Speaker: which for those who don't know, has a massive 45 megapixel sensor. But, um. For anyone who isn't a total camera nerd, why does that specific piece of hardware matter so much to this story?
Speaker 2: Well, it matters because of the actual mechanics of printing.
Speaker 2: If you take a standard photograph from like a typical camera or your phone and try to blow it up to the size of a museum wall, the image literally falls apart.
Speaker: Right. It gets a blocky,
Speaker 2: exactly.
Speaker: Mm.
Speaker 2: The pixel stretch, the edges blur, and it just turns into a digital mosaic. Yeah. With a massive high resolution sensor like the D 50, the camera is capturing this almost microscopic level of detail.
Speaker: It's gonna holds up when it's huge.
Speaker 2: Precisely correct. When you blow that image up to wall size, it doesn't blur at all. Uh, you can literally see the physical weave of the raw unowned fabric she pinned to her subject. You can see the texture of the skin. It retains all of its majesty.
Speaker: So because she had that solid technical foundation, she goes to a fine art print house in Tel Aviv to blow up five of her images.
Speaker: And this, I love this part. This leads to an encounter that reads like a scripted movie scene.
Speaker 2: It really sounds completely made up.
Speaker: It does. So she's at the print house picking up these massive framed museum grade prints. One of them is leaning against the counter. An older woman walks in, sees the print.
Speaker: And is absolutely floored by, it
Speaker 2: just stops in her tracks.
Speaker: Yeah. She turns to the man standing next to Cella and asks, are you photographers? And the guy just points to Cella and says, no, I'm just the driver. She's the photographer.
Speaker 2: That is the pivotal moment right there, because that older woman who walked in was Roy Biari, who is a highly renowned artist.
Speaker 2: Author and curator,
Speaker: what are the odds?
Speaker 2: I know, right? So they swap business cards. Kala looks her up later, realizes the sheer magnitude of who she just met in the art world and emails her and Roni invites her for coffee. In Tel Aviv
Speaker: though, Kala actually clarifies in the interview that she only drinks tea.
Speaker 2: Yes, she's very specific about that. But she goes anyway. She brings her portfolio. They sit down and they have that meeting.
Speaker: And the result of that team meeting is Roni securing Kala, an outdoor exhibition in a public park, featuring 38 of her massive images,
Speaker 2: 38. It's huge for a first exhibit.
Speaker: It is, and it was supposed to run for three months, but the public response was so overwhelming they actually extended it to five months.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker: But I have to stop you there because I want to challenge the framing of this whole sequence.
Speaker 2: Okay. Let's hear.
Speaker: It is so, so easy to look at that print house encounter and say. Wow, what a lucky break. Getting discovered at the print shop feels like the photography equivalent of, you know, getting discovered at a Hollywood di, the
Speaker 2: classic Cinderella story.
Speaker: Exactly. But based on the sources you provided us, was it really just a lucky break or did Cist preparation manufacture that exact outcome?
Speaker 2: I would actually argue that luck had almost nothing to do with it.
Speaker: Really? None at all.
Speaker 2: Well, this is just a perfect example of weaponized preparation. The curator, Roni Biari didn't just see a single good photo leaning against a counter.
Speaker 2: Think about the whole sequence of events.
Speaker: Okay. Layout.
Speaker 2: Cilla walked into that shop having shot on a high res D eight 50, so the image could survive scaling. She had already invested the money in museum grade paper, which is not cheap. When she sat down for tea, she had a fully realized professional portfolio ready to open.
Speaker 2: Roni didn't discover a lucky amateur. She discovered an artist whose infrastructure was already primed and ready to be scaled to a gallery level.
Speaker: That distinction is so important, so the infrastructure is there. She gets the gallery exhibit and it's a huge success. And then her mentor, Matthew. Ask is the most terrifying question an artist can hear.
Speaker 2: Oh, I know it's coming.
Speaker: What's
Speaker 2: next? Yeah,
Speaker: what's next? He pushes her to turn this momentum into a book, but deciding to scale up a localized gallery show into a 360 page book spanning 22 different geographical locations. Well, that turns this artistic dream into a total logistical gauntlet.
Speaker 2: Honestly, calling it a logistical nightmare almost does it a disservice.
Speaker 2: We are talking about five years of brutal grinding, stop and go momentum.
Speaker: It wasn't just a smooth process,
Speaker 2: not even close. First you have the outbreak of COVID to 19, just to get the administrative side of the project off the ground. She had to pitch the city art director while standing in a public hallway
Speaker: in a hallway,
Speaker 2: yet both of them wearing masks because nobody was allowed to meet in a closed office.
Speaker 2: Everything was restricted.
Speaker: Once the pandemic protocols finally started to ease up the geopolitical realities of the region set in, we are talking about literal war zones here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The physical danger was very real,
Speaker: right? Based on the historical facts detailed in the interview transcript. K three Liz's trips to the printing press in Hanon were completely halted because the area was physically hit during the war.
Speaker: She couldn't progress at all. She just had to wait out the conflict.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And the danger wasn't just during the manufacturing phase either. It was ever present during the actual field photography.
Speaker: Yeah. Tell me about the Jericho shoot.
Speaker 2: So there's a specific shoot detailed in your sources that took place in Jericho near the Mount of Temptation, and the environment around the shoot just became incredibly volatile.
Speaker: Like how volatile?
Speaker 2: Well, the crew literally had to pack up their gear and flee the area before sundown to escape a sudden riot involving burning tires and rock throwing.
Speaker: Just, I mean, picture the sensory experience of that for a second. The driver notices the escalating danger. He realizes that their vehicle has Israeli license plates, which could instantly make them a target in that specific chaotic moment.
Speaker 2: It was a huge liability.
Speaker: Huge. So he has to make a split second decision and cleverly navigate them out of the danger zone, using a much longer alternative route by the Salt sea just to get the crew out safely.
Speaker 2: Quick thinking on his part
Speaker: for sure. But the contrast here is just staggering to me. You have Kala behind the camera, meticulously adjusting pinned fabrics, dealing with lighting, coaxing out these serene, regal, timeless portraits of her subjects.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Creating total calm.
Speaker: Exactly. While the environment inches behind the camera is chaotic, dangerous, and completely unpredictable. Yeah. It's like extreme photojournalism dressed up as fine art.
Speaker 2: It really is. And the creation of the art in this case mirrors the history of the land itself.
Speaker: How so?
Speaker 2: Well, the process of making this book was enduring highly complex and born out of intense geographical and social pressures.
Speaker 2: The book isn't just a record of the faces on the pages. The physical object of the book itself is an artifact of the exact historical moment it was created in. It survived the very landscape it is documenting,
Speaker: which naturally leads to the biggest question, right? Why?
Speaker 2: Yeah, why do it?
Speaker: It's one thing to survive a riot, to get a photo, but looking through these notes you send us, the real question is why risk your physical safety?
Speaker: Why navigate literal war zones and riots just to take these portraits?
Speaker 2: It's a huge risk.
Speaker: It is. So to understand the urgency here, we really have to look at the cultural story that Kala felt absolutely compelled to tell.
Speaker 2: Right? And to understand that motivation, you really have to look at her personal background.
Speaker 2: So Kala originally lived in Chicago. Then moved to Liberia in 1967 as a young girl and finally relocated to Israel in 1970.
Speaker: So she's been there a long time.
Speaker 2: Oh, she has lived there for decades. Yeah. And her primary driving goal with this massive project was to forcefully dismantle the global misconception that Israel is an entirely white country.
Speaker: Right? She wanted to hold up a mirror to the reality she walked through every single day. Because we rely so heavily on these completely curated, flattened media narratives. We miss the actual human beings living on the ground.
Speaker 2: We miss the nuance completely.
Speaker: We really do. The book highlights an immense, often, completely overlooked diversity in the region.
Speaker: She is photographing Filipinos, Indians, Arabs, Iranians from Baghdad who arrived in the 1960s, Ethiopians and various established black communities,
Speaker 2: and she didn't just set up a studio somewhere and ask people to come to her. She went deep into these communities. To capture them authentically in their own spaces.
Speaker: I think the Yemenite wedding story is a perfect example of that.
Speaker 2: Yes. In one instance, she reached out to a social worker to help her find a Yemenite family to photograph. She ended up being invited to the wedding of a complete stranger, a Yemenite bride named Gila.
Speaker: And she didn't just snap a photo and leave, right?
Speaker 2: No, not at all. Kaila stayed at the wedding until one in the morning.
Speaker: Which speaks volumes about her anthropological approach. By staying until 1:00 AM she isn't just getting opposed staged shot of a bride. She is immersing herself deeply enough to document the authentic lived culture. She is literally earning the right to capture that whisper.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker: Another incredibly profound example of this is her portrait of the Chic of Sag of Shalom.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is a crucial piece of this puzzle. The chic represents a black community that has been rooted in the region for generations,
Speaker: and their history is wild.
Speaker 2: It really is. To understand why this matters, you have to look at the history detailed in the transcript.
Speaker 2: This community actually helped the British find water wells and survive the incredibly harsh desert landscape back when the British governed the area.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: They even have an entire museum dedicated to this specific history of survival and cooperation.
Speaker: That completely rewires how you think about the history of the region.
Speaker: It makes you stop and ask, you know, how much of our global worldview is shaped simply by an absence of imagery? We don't see these everyday realities, so we just assume they don't exist.
Speaker 2: That is precisely the mechanism at work in this book. Visual representation, rewrites, assumed histories.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Kala is forcing the viewer to recontextualize the term Middle East.
Speaker 2: She notes that we tend to use it as a modern political buzzword, usually associated with conflict, but she wants to return it to its ancient definition,
Speaker: the literal middle ground.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Geographically and historically, the Mediterranean is the literal middle ground. It was the ancient trade route connecting Europe.
Speaker 2: Africa and the Far East across the Red Sea and the Mediterranean,
Speaker: right?
Speaker 2: For millennia, people have been migrating, trading and settling in this exact spot. It has always been a crossroads of humanity,
Speaker: and what I absolutely love is that she doesn't just ask you to take her word for it. She provides receipts.
Speaker: She includes customized maps for all 22 locations featured in her book.
Speaker 2: Which is such a brilliant, deliberate editorial choice.
Speaker: Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 2: She isn't just showing you diverse faces floating in a void or a sterile white studio. By including those maps, she's pinning these diverse cultures directly onto the historical geography.
Speaker: Making it undeniable.
Speaker 2: Exactly. She's giving the reader tangible proof of this diversity. It anchors the transient whispers of the past directly into the physical dirt of the present.
Speaker: It's one thing to change how a reader sees the middle ground, but looking at these sources, what strikes me is that the act of taking these photos, of spending five years looking so closely at these 22 locations, it completely rewired Catherine's own brain too.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: How did this journey fundamentally change her as an artist?
Speaker 2: Well, it served as an absolute masterclass in the psychology of portraiture.
Speaker: Okay. Unpack that bit.
Speaker 2: When she approached many of these subjects, they lacked confidence. They didn't see themselves as fine art, mostly because society had never framed them that way.
Speaker 2: Cella had to learn how to coax their true personalities out.
Speaker: How did she do that?
Speaker 2: She would joke with them, make them feel profoundly comfortable and use lighting and styling to elevate them. And she did this until the exact moment they saw themselves in the mirror.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker 2: The transcript notes that they were often left completely speechless.
Speaker 2: By their own reflection.
Speaker: It's almost like a neurological override. These subjects are walking in carrying decades of societal messaging that tells them they aren't meant for museum walls.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker: And she isn't using the pinned fabric and the lighting to project a fake beauty onto them. She's using her camera to strip away all of that psychological baggage until they finally see their own baseline royalty, what is already there.
Speaker 2: That's spot on.
Speaker: And what's crazy is that even her own crew experienced this blindness.
Speaker 2: Yes. The crew's reaction is so telling. They would be setting up a shot looking at the physical location with their naked eyes, and all they would see was literally a pile of junk.
Speaker: A pile of junk.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They couldn't understand her vision at all.
Speaker 2: The environment looked chaotic and completely unusable to them, but then they would look through the lens of her camera and realize she found the absolute perfect framing. She saw the art where everyone else saw the mess.
Speaker: It's like a sculptor finding the statue inside a block of marble, which really highlights the profound overarching theme of this entire five-year journey when you strip away the logistics and the history.
Speaker: This is ultimately a story about the concept of sight.
Speaker 2: Sight. Yes. Think
Speaker: about it. She starts by capturing the invisible whispers of ancient history, making them visible to a world that assumed they didn't exist, and now she is embarking on a new project that is entirely heart. Strikingly about the preciousness of sight itself.
Speaker 2: It's an incredibly poignant pivot for her new project. She's shooting a 30-day lunar cycle photo series. She's photographing her subject every single day for a full month, and the subject is an Ethiopian woman who is slowly irreversibly going blind.
Speaker: Oh man. Just let the weight of that sink in. It's heavy.
Speaker: Kala is creating a visual document for this woman. She is using her skills to ensure that this woman has a tangible, beautiful, dignified memory of this part of her life before she loses her sight entirely.
Speaker 2: That is just incredible.
Speaker: The trajectory of Kala's work is astounding. She goes from making the unseen history of an entire nation visible to the world, to preserving the visual reality for one single woman before her world goes dark.
Speaker: It is a profound testament to the sheer power and responsibility of the photographer's eye.
Speaker 2: It really is. When you look at the full scope of the sources you provided us, it's just breathtaking. A five-year journey that begins with a simple lighting class assignment and some unowned pinned fabric
Speaker: Who would have thought,
Speaker 2: right, and it moves through the survival of riots, the navigation of wars, and the conquering of a global pandemic, ultimately resulting in whispers of the ancients.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate reminder of what happens when weaponized preparation, relentless grit, and an expansive vision all collide at once. For you listening right now since you brought us this material, if you wanna experience this visual history in its final physical form, it is important to note that the book is a highly limited run.
Speaker: Very limited.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. There are only 400 copies available in existence.
Speaker: Ah.
Speaker 2: If you want to dive deeper into the imagery, you can find it by going to culturalgymsphotography.com.
Speaker: Culturalgymsphotography.com. You definitely need to check that out, especially if you wanna see the stunning cover image of the African Queen from Benin on page 330 that we talked about earlier.
Speaker 2: Sure. Take it.
Speaker: Seeing how that raw fabric translates on a massive scale is worth the visit alone.
Speaker 2: Either the project that will completely challenge and recalibrate how you view the everyday world around you.
Speaker: Which brings us to our final thought for today. We've spent this entire time talking about how Kala captured the hidden histories of everyday people.
Speaker: So I want you to think about your own life. If a photographer were to walk into your life right now and take a portrait of you in your everyday environment, what ancient whispers of your own ancestors, your culture, and your unique history would be visible in the frame?
Speaker 2: That is a deeply fascinating question to sit with.
Speaker 2: What are we projecting that we don't even realize?
Speaker: Definitely something for you to mull over as you go about your day. Thank you so much for bringing us this incredible stack of sources and for joining us on this deep dive. We appreciate your time, we love your curiosity, and we'll catch you on the next one.