“It was love at first sight.”
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Born in Tel Aviv in 1973, Ran Bruchstein showed no artistic inclination and in fact felt he was an uncreative youth – “I couldn’t draw a straight line, or even trace a drawing with a tracing paper.”
He discovered photography by chance during military service, and fell in love. He learned the art, the techniques, and eventually a style began to emerge, a personal way of looking at things. “It was an amazing period. I photographed and developed at the expense of the army, and improved technically and in terms of artistic language. After being discharged, I kept on photographing, but the whole darkroom business and film and materials was too expensive. So it just ended, and my creative outlet was cooking, where I felt very comfortable.”
Still, the Pictorial Gods refused to let Ran slip from their grip. While on a business trip to Lapland, serendipity hit again and the blaze re-ignited. “When I returned to Israel, I took several courses. By this time I had a family, a wife, we had twin girls, life was very challenging, another daughter was born, and photography became my escapism. In the evenings, after everyone went to bed, I would go out into the garden, take pictures of exploding drops and breaking glasses, or alternatively get up early on a Saturday morning and photograph bees on flowers in the citrus trees in the garden.
“I may be a businessman, but mostly I’m a dreamer. Led by the belief that thoughts create reality. Photography expresses my emotional side. I’ve lived in Barcelona for six years now, and the photos in this exhibition mainly describe my mindset here, my life here, places where I like to hang out, my dreams.”
In the photos, Ran’s Barcelona meets his dreams and life, and the three merge into a new, symbiotic homogeneous entity: the landscape of the mind feeds off the physical landscape and vice versa, to create an emotional experience. In other words, his, “The photos depict the way I feel, and that’s also what I hope to invoke in the spectators – feelings.”