"Each photograph is a kind of self-portrait. I realized this when I started to run workshops with students. Suddenly I saw in the pictures the characters of photographers, their aura, temperaments. Then I started to see the same principle, dependence, in my own photos. You can't hide behind your art. Creativity means revealing yourself, a kind of public unmasking."
"Intimacy. Focusing on the interiors of houses, on empty rooms, staircases, ajar doors, I gained from childhood, from longing for parents who often went away. I would then enter their bedroom, breathe in the scent of perfume rising from my mother's dresses. The chair where Father usually sat during his first breakfast smelled of his cigar. The absence is moving, activating the senses and imagination. Photographing empty interiors I always had a sense of vibration of absent residents.
Photography turned out to be an ideal medium for me, an ideal means of expression. I could express my thoughts and my vision. My previous activities, such as ballet theater, even cooking, were ephemeral, one-off - they disappeared without a trace. The photo was durable, tangible and real. 1 patient. It happened that I only reached for some prints after many years, ten, even twenty, since they were made. I did not understand them at the time, I did not feel them, and suddenly a specific photo appealed to me, as if it hit the right time, my emotions and the style of other works. Photographs are like daydreaming - deeply embedded in us, metaphorical.
My photography teachers Lisette Model and Diane Arbus acted in the belief that "an artist can afford absolutely anything". Their teachings had the opposite effect on me, because I always felt that there were limits that one should not cross, one should not, one must not.
I stopped photographing around 1995. Digital photography was to me what post-war contemporary music was to my father. Not my language. I loved long hours in the darkroom - loneliness and focus, time to work on one negative, reaching the moment when the photo tells me And here the photo has changed dramatically - even the papers for making prints were different. I couldn't find materials that would suit me. The camera has almost been replaced by a computer and this has pushed me away from photography. Above all, however, the change has taken place in me, in my perception of the world. Suddenly I lost my previous way of seeing people and things that had a strong impact on me, moved me, made me want to photograph them. This need is gone.
This new way of expressing myself gave me great joy, For the first time in my life I was doing something absolutely mine - without a director, choreographer, costume, even without language! As in music - each musician plays the same score in their own way. Reality is one, but everyone sees and experiences it in their own individual way. The photographer chooses these emotions, beliefs, and way of seeing, not other details. I am convinced that the picture says more about the author than about the photographed motive itself. I feel that every photograph is a fraction of the photographer's self-portrait."
Eva Rubinstein (born in 1933), an outstanding photographer, author of photographs referred to as personal and intimate photography. Master of a metaphorical story - she saturates simple, un studied studies with emotions and the mood of the moment. Photography is her love of adulthood. After childhood spent alongside the famous father, pianist Artur Rubinstein, on numerous trips around the world, after experience on stage, as a dancer and actress, after marriage and divorce in 1968, she took up photography. She studied at with Sean Kernan and Diana Arbus, she studied at the New York Institute.