Fun Day: Oded Zidel

Susan Sontag writes in her book On Photography (1979): “To look at an old photograph of yourself or of anyone you know […] is first and foremost to feel: how much younger I was (she was, he was) then. For a photograph is an inventory of mortality.”

Oded Zidel is a veteran Jerusalem artist and the recipient of the Shoshana Ish-Shalom Prize for 2026. Zidel’s artistic language is characterized by graphic flattening, vivid colors, expressive painting, and a thread of humor running through all his works. Among his principal artistic influences are David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and Uri Reisman.

Zidel is a person with a young and curious spirit, constantly seeking new avenues of expression. Following his father’s death during the COVID period, he reconnected with his family albums as historical and emotional testimony to a family life that once existed and no longer does. In an attempt to bring his family members back to life, he painted the photographed scenes unfolding before his eyes. Unlike the age of digital overload, in which photography is common property and we are all subjects of the universal nation of photography, family-album photographs are more measured. Most were used to commemorate ceremonial moments conventionally considered worthy of documentation: holidays, a bar mitzvah, the birth of a new child, recruits at the end of a commander’s inspection before heading home for their first leave, a “fun day” at the factory, and more. Repainting these family scenes allows Zidel to encounter the child he once was, his young parents, his sisters, and also his grandfather and grandmother. Zidel opens a window for us onto a renewed discussion of historical testimony about life in Israel during his childhood. A thread of nostalgia and innocence is cast over these scenes: different clothing, different customs, a different atmosphere.

The old photographs do not contain the constant trivialization of the fleeting moment—the tireless documentation of our everyday lives today: where we were, what we did, and with whom; what we ate and what we will eat; who arrived and who left; what we wore and where we traveled. Instead, they offer a powerful representation of people who were photographed sparingly, sometimes also conveying an unconscious terror of the instant the shutter was pressed. Photographic documentation is like death for a moment, as many photography scholars have argued, among them Susan Sontag, who defined photographs as “an inventory of mortality.” Indeed, a photographed moment does not return to us unless we choose to bring it back to life through the adult’s gaze upon the child and by transposing the historical information revealed through acrylic paints and a contemporary perspective. This is much as Roland Barthes rediscovered the figure of his dead mother, who emerged before him from the old family photographs, in which she appeared in a double portrait with her brother. She was five and he was seven, and they held tightly to one another, with the specter of divorce threatening the integrity of their family unit in the background. Barthes focuses on the moment of recognition. An old photograph contains multilayered recognition: historical recognition, recognition of the people involved, and self-recognition. A profound recognition of smell, light, and sensation.

Oded Zidel began painting his father’s figure as a way of reconnecting with him after his death. He started with a festive scene from his bar mitzvah, in which everyone present is dressed in white in keeping with the occasion, their smiles frozen in time with an ominous quality. He continues with paintings of his sisters, in nature, on school trips, and during summer vacations. He paints his mother holding his baby sister, and also addresses the celebrations held in kindergarten during holidays or on birthdays. These are celebrations familiar to all of us to the point of exhaustion, yet they acquire a surprising and unusual charge. A renewed gaze that disrupts the order of events.

In a drawer of his father’s desk at the factory he managed, he found a forgotten photograph of a “fun day” at the factory, in which his father was photographed with his workers in a scene testifying to the warm, familial relationship between him and his employees. They are wearing swimsuits while he is dressed as usual, but the connection is evident. The camaraderie is there. What captivated Zidel was the fact that his father had chosen to keep this photograph for himself all those years.

In Zidel’s family-album paintings, the flat space and vivid colors stand out. At times, his painting technique allows for a comic respite from the seriousness of the photographed moments, from the effort to commemorate perfect lives, as was once customary and considered proper. Some of the figures are created with a thin, economical line, without flesh but with an implicit critique of the festive and moving occasions themselves, which, in retrospect, seem to have lost some of their original force.

The adult Zidel confronts his private and family past, his childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, and through it also his feelings as an individual within the family commotion. He adopts contemporary lines and contexts in his engagement with the past. This is a fascinating way to create a complete, multitemporal sentence about family life in general and about such a family in Israel of the past. It seems that this historical adventure leaves room for questions and interpretations on Zidel’s part. To this end, he employs humor and even sarcasm. Some figures from his past are viewed through a contemporary eye as frightening. This may be the incomprehensible gaze of a kindergarten teacher peering through the door, or a collection of shadows of family members and friends blending into the background at a Purim party in the kindergarten, potentially perceived by the viewer as a disaster waiting to befall those present.

In renewing the dialogue with photographs from the past, Zidel is free to create compelling contemporary contexts for them, as well as connections to events that are not necessarily chronological. Here he functions as an artist who pastes together and mends torn fragments from the sources of his life, enabling a renewed perspective, acceptance, and reconciliation between what was then and what exists and is present today—historically, artistically, and emotionally. He brings before the viewer’s eyes a fuller perspective on family life in general, and on life in Israel of the past in particular.

Anat Goral-Rorberger
Editing: Dr. Amit Kama