Yael Russcol
PHOTOGRAPHiC ART
ABOUT
I'm a lens-based artist working in Los Angeles. My work sits somewhere between photography and cinema.
People often ask, Are these movie stills? They're not. They are fragments of a film assembled in the viewer’s mind—and I shoot every image myself. A single line holds the images in orbit: never explaining them, only drawing them closer.
I work with photography and text together — in sequences where image and language collide, caught in that hum between what was and what might be.
In the Kinetic Series, the same archway, the same girl dancing on a beach, comes back flipped, shifted slightly in tint and contrast until you’re not sure if you’re remembering it or imagining it again. Meaning surfaces between the images, the way a memory surfaces —not whole, but in fragments that return shift and resettle. Perception becomes memory. Memory becomes identity.
do you perceive power as an external force?
Like a held breath.
Each piece carries its own question or statement, embedded directly in the artwork — often about who we are, and how we long to connect. The self in motion, circling, always becoming.
For me, kinetic energy isn’t physical — the ache of a glance held too long. A gesture that lingers. An encounter that keeps moving through the body long after it’s ended.
Life itself is cinematic-in motion, fragmented, assembling meaning before any camera is raised. The camera doesn’t construct that motion. It catches it. What it catches, the viewer keeps.
Sometimes the process is physical: images are printed, laminated, and
assembled like a puzzle — before being photographed. The final piece is the artwork. __________________________________________________________________________
BIO
Yael Russcol spent part of her childhood at Westbeth, the artist community in Manhattan’s West Village. She picked up a camera as a teenager and never put it down. She chased strangers, gestures, the charge between two people in the crowd — roaming Manhattan, Paris, and Southern California, absorbing the discipline of the decisive moment.
This became the foundation on which the Kinetic Series would later expand, gathering multiple moments into a single, larger current. Her early influences included Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and later, her mentor, artist and curator, John Coplans.
While studying film at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she continued to shoot on the street and in edgy situations, sharing her pictures with Adam Baruch, the Israeli writer-editor, a process that turned into a collaboration. He would write an essay inspired by her images, building a world around them. Each week, her photographs and his writing ran together in the weekend magazine of Yedioth Ahronoth, treated as editorial work.
PRACTICE
"I always wanted the pictures to move", she says. She has directed a feature thriller that premiered on HBO and written and directed a short film that screened on the festival circuit and was distributed by Lionsgate, along with music videos and film collaborations with visual artists. Photography remained the constant throughout - shooting street encounters alongside directed scenes on location and in the studio.
Her photographic archive became a laboratory for gesture, sequence, and the layering of images and words into a single experience, later crystallized in the Kinetic Series. Her editorial work and portraits have been published internationally, and her fine art practice is held in private collections across New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Mexico City.
In 2022 Saatchi Art curators singled out her work during a featured online exhibition for "changing the game." She has spent the years since expanding and culminating her core studio practice generating the complex constellations of image and text that comprise the Kinetic Series from her studio in Los Angeles.