‘Yair Oelbaum, Asleep in dirt ‘, a new photography book from Walther Koenig.

“In early 2014, my father gave me a Polaroid camera that had been lying around his office unused for years and was set to be thrown out.

The Polaroid Macro 5 was originally intended for dental and crime scene photography, but my own uses for the clunky device were unclear at first.

Over the next few months, through experimentation and trial and error, a potential use gradually emerged.

The camera quickly proved capable of capturing a feeling present in some of my (then) past images which I favoured most, but I was not able to readily recreate.

The prior images captured ordinary materials or subjects, but resulted in images that appear elusive and abstract—transformed by the staging, the framing and the process of being photographed.”

Text and photographs by Yair Oelbaum.

Yair Oelbaum was born in 1988. He grew up in West Hempstead in Long Island and now lives in Milan, NY, where he works as a clinical social worker.