Face Photography through a Social Psychological and Social Eye
By Doron Polak, art curator, 2001

According to Mordechai Rotenberg in his book Jewish Psychology and Hasidism, religion is connected to psychology when you speak about basic beliefs that are absorbed among the individuals of every society unknowingly through all means of communication. These codes are absorbed unconsciously and become an integral part of the personality of the individual, and of the general personality of the society.

Sima Ariam, the Israeli American psychologist who works in New York, investigates and studies, through her portraits, a whole community of Jews, Israelis and Americans who move between New York and Tel Aviv. The photography is the means to test connections between body and soul, between soul and behavior: it also tests connections of socialization from the point of view of the immigrant or stranger who becomes, through an ongoing process, into a type of native who is connected to the ones around him. This process gives special quality to her photographs.

Ariam is neither concerned with conventional studio lighting nor with general standards of lighting and positioning that are usually inherent in portrait photography according to classical standards. Instead, she concentrates and puts the "photographic responsibility" on the background, time, place and the social circumstances that brought her to the event; all of which happen most of the time by chance, and in documenting the object that attracts her eye, and becomes the subject of her photograph. The local community: writers, poets, artists, politicians and people of means and stature, are all photographed through the lens of her camera. All of them are connected by the very fact of their presence at specific social events, events that, according to the perception of the community, are being used as a reason or cause that allow for the existential continuation of the community of natives/immigrants.

According to Matthew Arnold's 19th century book "Culture and Anarchy," the central psychological factor of Judaism is the rejection of disconnection, and central to the religion is the collective communal perception and mutual help. The Israeli American community that is exposed to Sima Ariam's camera receives a different and reactive interpretation by the photographer, who is also a psychologist and is capable of utilizing reasoning, causes or situations to choose the angle, position, the face and even the background of the photographed figure. The tools that she uses simultaneously as a psychologist and a photographer create a relevant point of view, specific only to her, a perspective that is unique and exclusive to her work.

The famous New York photographer Richard Avedon tells in the book that accompanied his last exhibition at New York's Metropolitan that the subject who is being photographed behaves like an actor in the theatre, and that the setting of the photograph serves as a dramatic performance for him. Avedon is influenced, according to his words, by classic icons of art history like Egon Schiele, Rembrandt and Francis Bacon. While Avedon relates totally to portrait photography like a theatrical challenge, Sima Ariam relates to the portrait in a diametrically opposed way. She is direct, immediate, real and unstaged. As a psychologist, she observes the treated object through her lens, capturing him in a special unguarded moment when his face reflects his inner "godly wholeness" -- past, present and future - all in "one decisive moment" (Henri Cartier-Bresson) the life force. Sima Ariam captures the passion within the person.

As her colleague psychiatrist Dr. Philip Romero said: "Sima Ariam captures the passion within the person, the life force, the true being, she sees more than looks - she is probing, she feels, she questions, she instigates curiosity. All of that opens the gateway to the story about the subject. It elicits the viewer's emotional response to the point that one feels one has an emotional connection to the subject and the photographs."
The sculptor Jack Lipchitz said in an interview from the seventies: "That art has a strong connection with the society that creates it. Only when the artist is thinking about the public - it too needs to think about him. Only with a reciprocal relationship like this can the creation be really great. Sometimes my vision changes from day to day because my mood changes. In order to sculpt my muse I find interest in following those transformations that I don't have control over.

Similarly, Sima Ariam creates her photographic portraits while connecting and bonding with her photographed subjects, as a friend to her friends and a social initiator of cultural and communication events. This positive interaction that she radiates on her photographed objects is returned to her in her photographs, and is expressed in her unique photographs.