Alicia in Golden Dress, 2005

"The images in this series are an attempt to capture human stories in everyday life, those that exist in the space between the odd and the ordinary."

—Michal Chelbin

Alicia in a Golden Dress is from Michal Chelbin's Strangely Familiar series, a body of work that features sympathetic pictures of performers and wrestlers from small towns in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, England, and Israel. In the introduction to the artist's monograph, Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes (Aperture, 2008), Leah Ollman writes that in Alicia in a Golden Dress, "a self-possessed young woman in radiant gold displays her poise in a dancer's turned-out stance. Like a showpiece or a pet, she performs on command under the watchful eye of her grizzled father, who stands behind their equally battered car."

Chelbin's most frequent subjects are children and adolescents. As she states, "My aim is to record a scene where there is a mixture of direct information and enigmas and in which there are visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, normal and abnormal. My playground lies between the private and the public, between fiction and documentary."

C-Print
Image Size: 11 x 11 inches
Paper Size: 20 x 16 inches
Edition of 30 + 5 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Michal Chelbin (b. 1974, Haifa, Israel) has lived in Brooklyn since 2006. She served as a photographer in the Israel Defense Force spokesman unit for two years in her youth. Chelbin studied photography at WIZO Academy of Design and Education in Haifa from 1997 to 2001. Her work has appeared internationally in group and solo shows in Israel, Los Angeles, New York. Chelbin’s work is held in many private and public collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Sir Elton John collection; LACMA, Los Angeles; Getty Center, Los Angeles; The Jewish Museum, New York; Palazzo Forti, Verona, Italy; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and SF Moma. Her Monograph, Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes (Aperture, 2008) was awarded PDN’s Photo Annual Book Award in 2009. Michal regularly contributes to the world’s leading magazines, including The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, BusinessWeek, GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, Le Monde, among others.