I make composite photographs about assembling a self from parts that were never supposed to fit. Born in Hungary, raised on a kibbutz in Israel, and remade in New York, I learned early that identity is not found whole; it is built.

I grew up a double outsider, always the newcomer, and a gay boy in every culture I called home. My images stage that experience as surreal tableaux: the body and the natural world bonding into figures I assemble.

The outsider experience is painful, so I spent my youth building shields. The one I trusted most I built out of science: cold, clean, factual. No room for questions meant no room for rejection, because facts are not a matter of opinion. I decided to be exceptional: a degree in biochemistry, a master’s in organic chemistry, knowledge worn as armor and, too often, used as a weapon. I rejected others before they could reject me, and I rejected art most of all: non-factual, chaotic, meaningless. I never thought I would become an artist.

The greatest caveat is that a shield only works if the enemy is on the other side. Slowly I came to realize that what I was defending against lived inside the armor with me. The hurt I had internalized became my own worst critic, my own worst enemy.

The crack in the shield came from science itself. The deeper I studied, the clearer it became that nature holds no meaning - meaning is something we prescribe. Yet I kept catching my professors doing exactly that, reading intention into indifferent phenomena, and it enticed me: why do we insist on meaning where there is none? My curiosity turned inward, the one direction scientific practice had never pointed me, and what I found there was unsettlement, pain, and anger: pressure building with no tangible way out.

When I finally picked up a camera, the shield became my instrument, and the pressure found its release. The discipline never left; it changed direction: as a chemist I manipulated matter and molecules; now I manipulate pictures and pixels, discovering meaning instead of uncovering facts. Each work begins as a staged session with dancers, performers, and friends, who are all extensions of myself, and ultimately myself, in self-portraits. I build the final image from dozens of frames, most of them my own, some found in stock because they fit my vision, selecting and bonding elements the way I once combined reagents, until the seams disappear and something that never existed reads as inevitable.

The process became healing. Its beauty encouraged me to shed my defenses; its demands forced me to look inside and face my burdened parts, still yearning to be unburdened. That healing is still ongoing. And as it develops, I observe the world around me and project the process onto it: the tableaux widen, and the body, nature, and technology collide, often asking what we worship, what we censor, and what we willingly give away.

I want viewers to feel rapture first and recognition second. I am not interested in nice or easy images; I see beauty in rawness, and I want the work to carry at least a small sense of unease which is the same unease I face in my own life. Beauty is the door, and once through it, the discomfort of the unfamiliar is waiting. When people are made uncomfortable, they either embrace the unease and evolve, or they resist it and turn their discomfort into a weapon - against others and, unknowingly, against themselves. If my work can give permission to embrace that unease, it has done its job. And for anyone who has ever been othered, I want it to stand as evidence: the parts of you that don’t fit are the ones worth building with. I became my own composite.