
Spring
- Publisher
- Perimeter Editions
- Year
- 2018
- ISBN
- 978-0-6482628-3-1
- Specifications
- Self-cover with screen-printed vinyl dust jacket
29.7 x 21 cm
28 pages
Third Perimeter book after Sunset and Golden Showers
Dafy Hagai's Spring sees the young Israeli photographer offer a new layer of complexity and fluidity to the visual languages and queer motifs she established in her first two publications for Perimeter Editions. Where the faux-idyllic landscapes, beach scenes and unusual architectures of 2015's Sunset shone with a playful, sexually curious take on the female gaze, 2016's Golden Showers pulsed with a kind of charged, innuendo-heavy sexuality, veering toward the realm of the smut-flecked outtake.
Spring catches the London-based Hagai at another point of transition. Shot amid the marginal urban spaces that punctuate Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Arad and Furadis – and punctuated with images from the more lush surrounds of Sakhne and the Dead Sea – the series lends a vantage on a gender dynamic that is as equally hard to define as its socio-geographical context.
Here, Hagai juxtaposes members of Israel's drag community against public passersby, and gender-ambiguous models against candid, more traditional visions of masculinity. We're left in a kind of flux – a position that feels refreshingly authentic in a contemporary moment when most Western media tends to mark such terrain with broad, often clumsy strokes. In capturing this drag and gender-fluid scene with all its intricacy and detail, Hagai's Spring delivers a more nuanced rendering of intersecting subcultural sensibilities.