Untitled
2008

In Untitled, Elad Lassry restages a photograph from a 1971 science textbook in which a group of young people sit together on an optical illusion of a house to illustrate perception. To create this photograph, Lassry replicated the floor diagram of the house and asked models to interact with it while holding poses and repeating gestures for the camera: contrived movements and staged interactions that reveal the participants falling in and out of character. Indeed, Lassry—known for appropriating various image sources in his staged photographs, collages of found material, and films—bypasses the image’s original use as didactic material and instead focuses on the individual models, turning the image into a psychological portrait, as well as a platform for new action.