Personal experiences entered Death of Adonis in this way. When I was a boy, I was riding my bicycle and a motorcycle hit me. I was lying in the middle of the street, and I ignored the pain in the embarrassment. I just didn’t want it to be the talk of the town the morning after.
The idea for the location for Death of Adonis came to me while I was looking for a spot for a different picture. I was walking next to the store with the advertisement of the lady and I saw the curve of the road. Suddenly, I remembered John Filo’s picture of Jeffrey Miller at Kent State, with the girl kneeling next to his body. I thought: I can do Death of Adonis here, and I combined the picture from Kent State with the story of the death of Adonis.
At the time, I was teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. It’s very different teaching photography in Israel than in many other countries because when you send your students to the streets of Jerusalem, they come back sometimes with images of terror attacks. One of them came with a photograph of a boy lying on the street. I took all the different images and combined them into one to become Death of Adonis. Adonis was a metaphor for “forever young.”
I don’t like to work with professional actors because sometimes they overact, and I want to say something very raw. In the past, I worked with people I knew and now I work a lot with Facebook. I write a short synopsis of what I’m looking for and my assistant and I go through all the faces and look for people that could act in the image. The woman kneeling next to Adonis was a flamenco dancer and a friend of mine. I wanted her to take the part of the girl who sat next to the dying boy in John Filo’s photograph of the Kent State shooting because I felt that her experience with flamenco could bring something very expressive to the stage.
I wanted the street to be full of women that I personally knew. They represent the women from my childhood. When I was growing up, the women around me were always pregnant, because they were religious and had 10 kids. When I staged the pregnant woman, I thought about the cycle of life. The boy might be dying, but in a way, his soul is going into her body. This is the nature of life: something dies, but at the same time, it’s getting back to life.
One of the women asked me about the story behind the image, and I told her about the death of Adonis. She told me that she had a son the age of the boy on the set who died from cystic fibrosis, and she had a picture of him in a locket that she always carried. She asked if she could bring her locket to the set, and I said, “Yes. Just keep the image inside.” When I took the picture, I wasn’t aware that she had held the locket because the situation touched her. I would never have posed her like that, but it worked. When I looked at the image later, I decided it needed to stay.
When we shot Death of Adonis, I scheduled with the police in advance to close the street from both sides. We started to take the picture and there was a lot of noise because I had the wind machine on set. I wanted the bodies of the women to be visible through the cloth, like the Hellenic style of sculpture, and decided to do this with the wind. Suddenly, a different police unit came to the set and asked us to move because it was a Saturday, a holy day when you have to be quiet. It was a big mess. I shouted to the women, “Run, run, run, we have to take the picture!” The expressions on their faces! It’s something that I could never achieve in a different situation. You can plan everything, but things turn out differently than you expect.
The moment after a major event is much more interesting than the decisive moment. The decisive moment is kind of a cliché. I’m interested in what happens after someone dies: what happened to his family? When you show the moment after, or sometimes the moment before, you tell a much larger story. In Israel, we’re all post-traumatic, in a way. We all experienced the moment after.
If it’s a good image, it doesn’t really matter if it happened or not. It’s staged photography; there is no one truth. It doesn’t really matter if it’s Christ who’s surrounded by the women or if it’s Jeffrey Miller, or Adonis, or me as a young boy. If it’s good art, I believe that the image can live forever.
Find out more about In Dialogue, a new series in the Getty Center Museum’s permanent collection galleries.
