They say that to understand what it means to be an authentic human being is to accept and appreciate the fact that we are going to die. To cope with the fact that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of death or what Martin Heidegger would call dealing with “being-towards-death”. It is an indisputable fact that contemporary society is not keen on accepting the issue of death. The politics of fear and its ultimate contention – death – have come into usage as a tool to keep people dependent on power. Although an authentic human life can only be found by facing finitude and trying to find meaning in the end of our life, we prefer to stay alive in an artificial but safe environment, protected by something that takes this genuine factor – mortality – from our existence.
In his photography, Dror Daum views the subject of authenticity in an intelligent and indirect way. His images are very often manipulated and undergo post-production, but in a manner that deconstructs the concept of a “photoshopped image”, which, by the way, is quite banal and overused nowadays. To observe his photographs is to carefully examine every image, searching for a mistake that could move us back to the boundary between the natural and the artificial. Yet I believe that what is fascinating about these two terms is when we come to understand that culture (means that which is fake) is all about an attempt to petrify nature, capturing its moments, freeing them in order to falsely shape and fashion our selfhood.
