Ori Gersht

Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 5 March 1967. The birth year is corroborated across many biographies and gallery records; the exact day is documented in a single Hebrew-language biographical source, so it is treated here with slightly lower confidence than the rest of his biography. He has lived and worked in London since 1988. He earned a BA (Hons) in Photography, Film and Video from the University of Westminster, London, completed in 1992, and an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London, completed in 1995.

Gersht's practice uses photography and video to explore history, memory, violence, and beauty, frequently through the device of destruction rendered in extreme slow motion, as in Pomegranate (2006) and the Blow Up and Big Bang series, in which fruit, flowers, and vases are shot or exploded and filmed at high frame rates. A parallel body of landscape work, including The Forest and White Noise, was made by traveling to sites in Eastern Europe associated with the Holocaust and twentieth-century political violence. He is a professor of photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Kent, England.

Critical attention to Gersht has centered on the tension in his work between formal beauty and violent or traumatic subject matter. Major museum surveys, including History Repeating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 and This Storm Is What We Call Progress at the Imperial War Museum, London the same year, framed his still-life explosions and landscape photography as a sustained meditation on how images of destruction and disaster can also, unavoidably, be beautiful. General-interest and art press coverage, including notice in Vanity Fair and the New York Times, has repeatedly returned to this pairing of aesthetic pleasure and historical violence as the defining tension in his work.

Gersht's secondary market is small and largely untested relative to the scale of his museum program. The highest publicly recorded auction price for his work is USD 107,100 (about EUR 92,711) for Untitled 5 from Blow Up, sold at Phillips, New York, in the Photographs sale on 7 October 2021. Most of his gallery-sale prices for single photographic works have been reported in the low thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, and auction appearances remain infrequent, so any single result should be read as a data point rather than a stable index of value.

Gersht has no catalogue raisonne, and authentication for his photographic editions and video works runs through his representing galleries, Yancey Richardson in New York, Talley Dunn in Dallas, Michael Hoppen in London, and Noga in Tel Aviv. His market strength is institutional rather than speculative: his work sits in the collections of the Getty, the Guggenheim, the Victoria and Albert Museum, LACMA, SFMOMA, and other major museums, which supports long-term demand, but the auction record is thin, with only a small number of public sales documented to date. Collectors should treat any individual auction result, including the current record set at Phillips in 2021, as a data point from a shallow market rather than a settled benchmark.