Reflections from Others
Merav underwent traditional initiation as a medicine woman in the Lakota way, trained as a group facilitator in ecotherapy and as a circular breathing therapist. She has extensive experience supporting women coping with complex post-traumatic stress, and knows how to hold a process in a safe, professional, and precise manner. Her combination of working with water imagery together with circular breathing creates a rare experience of healing, presence, and connection to our deepest emotions. Merav has an exceptional sensitivity to the energetic field, the body, and the emotional realm.
In her work, water is a gateway to emotional movement that allows opening and expansion from within. Every meeting with her is a deep journey that enables a person to meet themselves with courage, gentleness, and genuine listening. I wholeheartedly recommend the unique and profound work that Merav Dorchin brings to the world.
Elad Carmel,
"The Red Road"
What are Water Images?
When we come to read an ancient text, there is the first glance — the plain meaning. In order to go deeper and reveal further meanings and connections, we use a second glance — interpretive reading. Likewise, with water images, we are given the choice of how to look. Water is indeed a physical substance, but its quality of reflecting colors and shapes that are not its own turns it into a bearer of the image of its surroundings. Just as my reflection appears when I look into a calm body of water, so too do forms arise for me from the water images, testifying to my state of mind. Whether it is my own figure that is reflected, the figure of the photographer, or the infinite objects in the space, water always reflects for those who wish to see.
From the interpretive perspective, I become aware that it is into the depths of my own soul that I am looking through the water images captured by Merav’s lens. The water images are a gateway, and the ‘water breath’ is the tool that allows passage through that gate. Either way, the journey is inward, into myself.
Imri,
A partner for The Red Road
“Stills Photography as Stream of Consciousness”:
On the Photography of Water by Merav Wegerhoff-Dorchin
Uri Dorchin
For about six years, Merav has been photographing water. Yet photography is only one aspect, a technical and aesthetic one, within the broader spectrum of meanings that water holds in her world. “Living water” is a term she often uses when speaking of her work, and similar to the biblical context in which this term appears (for example, Jeremiah 2:13), in Merav’s case as well, the biological, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of water cannot be disentangled from one another.
At first glance, photographing bodies of water seems like a simple act, bound to an everyday experience, far removed from the heroic aura reserved for images of exotic sites, rare animals, or breathtaking landscapes. Indeed, there is nothing technically complex in photographing water. Yet this seemingly ordinary act generates representations that unsettle the taken-for-granted. The water as it appears in Merav’s photographs does not always immediately read as water. Often, color, texture, composition, and movement exempt the water from its liquid state, presenting it in a wide array of shifting forms — even though the photographs themselves undergo no filtering or digital manipulation, as is common in nearly all contemporary photography.
