Ayala Gazit

Born in Haifa, Israel in 1984, I was raised in Tel Aviv by an American mother and an Israeli father.  When I was 12 years old my father told me that I had an older brother named James, who lived in Australia.  James was the product of a relationship my father had had with an English woman named Linda, who subsequently moved to Australia and started a family.  Uncomfortable being the eldest child in my family, I felt a great need for an older brother and became obsessed with the idea of James.  Unfortunately my father and I never had the chance to meet James as he committed suicide in October 1996.

In 2005, I moved to New York to complete a BFA in photography at The School of Visual Arts. I graduated with Honors in May 2009, and was fortunate enough to be chosen as the single student to receive the Tierney Fellowship.

Feeling a need to learn more about James, I used the Tierney Fellowship to travel across Australia in search of James. I wanted to better understand who I'd been mourning all these years. Through the help of his family I was able to follow the steps and echos of my brother whom I will never meet. The work I created consists of family snapshots, quotes from conversations, letters and my own images taken in Australia and Israel.