Broken Houses is a series of images of dilapidated and abandoned buildings, destroyed by weather, decay and neglect. Artist Ofra Lapid found photos of these homes and buildings on the web while pursuing an amateur photographer from North Dakota (name not disclosed) who obsessively documents the decaying process of these houses- not unlike these wonderful artists who are also obsessed with decaying and abandoned homes. Ofra then built small scale models of these and photographed them again, omitting the backgrounds and placing them on grey fields.
Ofra at work in her studio:
Model of one of her Broken Assembled Houses (as she calls them) prior to being photographed:
The result is the following series of digital pigment prints (cropped for this blog post) sized 30×36 cm (16”x18”):
Ofra describes her work as follows:
"The point of departure for my photographic works is in images found on the Internet. I browse around the virtual space in search of raw material. The main subjects of my research are domestic environments and various architectural structures, as well as routine cityscapes. The images at which I point are those of the unusual, bizarre, fantastic, catastrophic, tragic, poetic, funny, surreal; ones which were free to download. The use of web-based images gives me the freedom to appropriate both image and context, namely the story behind it, the subject matter. I enjoy manipulating the original photograph: erase; cut, copy, and paste; print; create crafty models; build something broken; create an illusion; change the meaning; emphasize something from the past (of no obvious relevance); photograph a photograph; enlarge something that is very small; meet new people; discover remote parts of the world; be in many places at once; humanize the computer; settle conflicts. Art for me is a good way to resolve the relentless conflicts existing in everyday life. It is a way to communicate, respond, and negotiate every thought, every action, every lasting desire."
Ofra Lapid