Refracted Light

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

I’ll admit it: What drew me to meet with Yehoshua Aryeh Stauber and his wife Jordyn at their new fine art photo gallery in Jerusalem wasn’t the breathtaking photographs I saw on their website, nor even the interesting life story they outlined in their email and promised to share in more detail. It was the fact that they are so young. They were married in 2018, after his first year of college, and now they have their very own art gallery in a choice location right behind the Mamilla Hotel!

Yehoshua Aryeh and Jordyn greet me in their gallery, together with their nine-month-old baby daughter Eliana Ruth (although she is sleeping for most of the interview). The gallery, which opened this past Succos, is a beautifully designed room, with sleek, modern décor in shades of black and white. The space was completely empty when they took it over last summer and designed the gallery from scratch: the lighting, the room arrangement, including a floating wall, and the back office. Displayed along the walls, mounted on plexiglass, are large prints of landscape photography — it’s a relatively new art form, and their gallery is unique in Israel.

All the photos show scenes of Eretz Yisrael, but they aren’t your typical Israeli postcard scenes, nor is it your typical photography. These are portraits that are as much art as photography, and the choice of subject — nature scenes that don’t necessarily have that instantly recognizable this-is-from-Israel feel — is quite intentional.

“Because of our location, we have people coming in here from all over the world, and from all nationalities — Jews and non-Jews, from Europe, South Asia, all over,” says Yehoshua Aryeh. “Our goal is to show the world a different face of Israel.”