Natural Worker Leor Grady

Natural Worker is a digital book which contextualises Leor Grady’s work within a broader discourse of Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations in Israel.

The book features an essay by Sivan Rajuan Shtang, ‘Strange Boquet – on Leor Grady’s works’, which fleshes out the role of photography in  “enabling the visualization of abstract political ideas”, literally using photography to frame Yemeni culture as both the purest link to Israel’s biblical past, and a backwards culture in need of reformation. The absence of human presence in the photographic series Shtang refers to, where “different types of plants are photographed against dark blue velvet fabric commonly associated with Jewish ritualistic articles” – points to the lost stories of the Yemeni woman who have used these herbs for all kinds of rituals. Leaving them out of the photograph echoes their systematic erasure fromthe order Zionist visual culture was busy creating.