Selected Works

Tomer Ganihar, was born in 1970, in Israel.

Ganihar is a self-taught photographer who grew up and works in Israel. Since an early stage, Ganihar’s photography has focused mainly on crowds and on the Israeli young counterculture scene, rave parties, night clubs culture and multi-days nature parties in the Galilee forests and the Dead Sea. This work reflects a modern spiritual and cosmopolitan culture as an alternative to the reality of militarism, conflicts and religious tension in the Middle East. The New Yorker wrote: “There is elegy to the ecstasy in Tomer Ganihar’s photographs of young Israeli party goers…’Raving in the Negev Desert’ vibrates with mystical presence; its impressionistic blurs unite youthful bodies and ancient sand. In more recent years, Ganihar’s photography is focused on abstracts of light and form.

Ganihar captures his images without artificial lighting, using color film only. Deborah Bach writes in The New York Times: “Perceiving light as a holy, unifying force, Mr. Ganihar works without a flash, using a slow shutter speed to capture the available light of his surroundings. The effect is often ethereal, the grainy figures in his photos awash in a kinetic radiance”.

“Pan, focus, dissolve; the visual variables are cinematic as much as they are photographic” wrote Robert Storr, “This is unsurprising given that Ganihar is also a filmmaker, and necessary given that the targets of his lens are usually kinetic”.

Ganihar’s first solo exhibition was shown at Limbus gallery of photography, Tel Aviv 1997, when he was awarded by The Israeli President Residence Prize for Young Artists. In 2000, he became the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Since then, his works has been solo shown in museums and galleries such as Helsinki City Art Museum, GL STRAND Museum in Copenhagen, Contemporary Arts Center-Museum New Orleans, Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery N.Y and the Headquarters of the United Nations, New York.

Ganihar has participated in the international pavilion at the 52 Venice Biennale, in 2007, curated by Robert Storr (art academic) with his photo-series “hospital party”.