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.

It is striking to observe the gap between the seemingly simple concept of water photography and the enigmatic effect these images produce. The reason lies in the fact that we rarely perceive water in itself, as it is. Of course, we all see water daily; sometimes we even pay attention to it, yet almost never is water detached from the context in which it appears. This fact is especially evident in photography, where water typically serves concepts of beauty inscribed in our consciousness through consumer and leisure culture: a sunset over the sea, a waterfall in a tropical forest, an urban street in rain, and so forth. It is no surprise, then, that when a photograph liberates water from these aesthetic expectations, it becomes difficult to recognize it. When the lens focuses on the water itself — not on its surroundings — it allows a renewed, unusual encounter with the immanent qualities of the material. The visual representation of water is simultaneously utterly simple and yet capable of evoking a sense of strangeness and mystery.

Photography as a medium, and water as its central object, were not emerge arbitrarily as the channel through which Merav expresses herself. Photography is, by nature, a non-verbal medium that offers an experience distinct from that anchored in spoken or written language. Indeed, throughout her life, language was never Merav’s preferred means of expressing complex thoughts and emotions. Like many of the second generation of Holocaust survivors, Merav grew up in a space dominated primarily by silence. Memory, trauma, what did or did not happen, the family that exists and the one that does not, were present in her environment only as fragmented, fleeting images that emerged from the silence and sank back into it. Yitzhak, Merav’s father, was born in Bochum, Germany, in 1941. By the age of four he was orphaned, and by five he was brought to Israel, where he was raised in a boarding school for immigrant children, displaced like him. This early encounter with the world etched in young Zigbert Wegerhoff  - his name as a toddler in Germany — the realization that the most basic things - mother, home, life - not only cannot be taken for granted, but cannot be understood at all. The encounter with the Israeli society of the 1950s, indifferent and hostile to the trauma of Holocaust survivors, taught him to silence himself and abandon entirely any search for possible answers. The daily routine — mainly hard manual labor and the family he built with Vicky, Merav’s mother — became his sole and necessary anchor of certainty. Within this framework, bodies of water became a refuge for him, especially the Mediterranean coasts around Haifa and the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Over the years, it was to these water sources that Merav returned with her camera.

Within the enveloping silence of her immediate surroundings, Merav developed a pattern of thought imbued with much of the nature of water. One central challenge in writing about water in social, psychological, or artistic contexts is avoiding metaphors, which almost always verge on cliché. Nevertheless, in attempting to characterize Merav’s “watery” thinking, I must rely on metaphors, using them sparingly and carefully. Merav’s thoughts and ideas, as she gives them expression, flow, blend, and permeate one another in ways that often seem incomprehensible, at times even absurd. Her logic is not necessarily based on clear causal relations, conventional binary distinctions, or rigid structures of dimensions such as time, space, kinship, or sequences of historical events. It is no wonder, then, that she never felt comfortable with the standard pedagogical patterns of formal education systems.

An expression of this fluid mode of thought can easily be traced in the associative texts Merav has been writing, mostly for herself, in recent years. In this context, water provides a convenient medium: it allows her both the certainty grounded in materiality and the freedom of movement and continual change. Consider, for example, the following testimony:
 

The source of water, the source of life
Within them exist the most protected areas within me.
There, there is energetic coding that changed paths
And perhaps there, there is a plan
There, there is nourishment
There, there is vibration and resonance
There, there is healing, the cure
There, there is memory of being remembered
There, there is listening, settling
There, there is a collective
There, there is unconditional love
There, there is stumbling, stepping
There, there is vibration, story, and coding
There, activity exists
There, there is connection to pass through
There, there is guidance of the night
There, there are supporters and birth-givers
There, there are elder grandmothers
There, there are mothers and women beings
There, there are strong children, roots
There I have the making of contact

This kind of intuitive writing emerges as a “stream of consciousness,” a term that, not by chance, evokes water. It would be wrong to say there is no logic here, for these texts, as contradictory as they may seem, are anchored in a coherent conception of reality. They do not attempt to describe reality as it is, but to imagine it as a possible state. The British anthropologist Martin Holbraad argued that the unique concepts humans produce must be recognized as creating worlds radically different from one another (which he called “infinitions,” a notion which stands for inventive definition). This idea undermines the image of language as a purely referential tool, the widespread notion that concepts drawn from different languages refer to a single, objective reality preceding cultural difference. For example, when Merav speaks of the rebirthing therapy she facilitates, she refers to it as “water breathing.” Water breathing is an infinition of this sort: the concept may appear impossible at first, yet its very articulation renders it a possible — even if virtual — reality. In her approach to language, Merav resonates with the core of phenomenological thought, which assumes that being is anchored in subjective experience. This approach is progressive in at least two ways: first, it offers a democratic approach to knowledge, since if being is grounded in experience, different knowledge systems necessarily hold equal status, and none is superior or more logical than another. Second, it assumes constant transformation. Each infinition “rearranges the furniture in the world,” as Holbraad put it. Those who accompany Merav in the circular breathing process may have a better chance of understanding the possible logic embedded in “water breathing.”

Thinking about reality through fluid concepts increased Merav’s willingness to engage in a variety of experiences, sometimes extreme. These qualities prepared her to accompany women survivors of sexual assault whose trauma disrupted their sense of certainty in the reality they once knew. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman writes that “trauma is the catastrophe of the powerless.” In situations of powerlessness, when escape is impossible, the victim transforms physical detachment into a cognitive distancing that creates a buffer between self-perception and the body being violated. Recovery requires rebuilding trust in the social environment and interpersonal relationships, as well as restoring a sense of estrangement from the affected body and a sense of autonomy over it. Yet the process must be driven by the patient themselves. A good therapist is not one who shields their patient from the necessary confrontation with trauma, but one who can accompany them through it without fear of exposure to traumatic content and vicarious experience. Indeed, the security Merav inspires in trauma-affected women stems from her readiness to move with them through shifting states, to navigate between fractured selves, to sink with them into the depths of horror, and to guide them back to the here and now. Merav’s abstract water images allow the women she accompanies to approach threatening material.

 
From the moment water became both the material and central concept through which Merav experiences and interprets reality, she has used it consciously as a key to understanding various relationships and situations. This tendency, intuitive rather than intellectual, led Merav to deepen her engagement with the shamanic worlds of “The Red Road” associated with the Lakota people of North America. The adoption of elements from cultures once labeled “animistic” is far from expressing a romantic stance toward the world. On the contrary, it reflects a grounded stance that confronts and interprets processes with dramatic effects on our world. Indeed, the recognition of relations between humans and non-human beings now lies at the center of research across various fields, including philosophy, anthropology, ecology, computing, science and technology studies (STS), among others. All these fields increasingly move away from the anthropocentric approach that developed alongside modernization, and view the world as a closed system in which species of very different kinds engage in symbiotic relations with one another.

More than any other material, water allows us to internalize this reality of interspecies entanglement, as the American anthropologist Donna Haraway termed it. In the context of “living water,” it is true that water gives life, but it also constitutes a habitat in itself. Water teems with life. In this sense, water is never merely a “resource” serving those who consume it, for it sustains the living worlds within it, which in turn act upon the body that drinks it, upon the soil into which it percolates, upon other water bodies it feeds, upon the air into which it evaporates. Water is the great equalizer, erasing the barrier between the consumer and the consumed, between outside and inside, between subject and object, between active and passive.

The various paths that led Merav to the world of water shape her photography as an aesthetic creation that neither reduces to the material realm nor fully submits to the realms of psyche and spirit. Her art binds sensory experience to intellectual engagement, ensuring that water functions continuously both as substance and as concept, as reality and as idea. For her, as someone standing waist-deep in water while photographing it, this is an obvious, indivisible connection. Merav’s water photographs thus open a window onto different dimensions of material, human, and non-human being, redefining each in relation to the others.