Tova Katzman is an American-Israeli artist and visual storyteller from the U.S. After graduating from MassArt in 2015, she worked, traveled and volunteered throughout the states and abroad until receiving a Fulbright fellowship to pursue a photo and video project in Panama in 2017. She believes in the potency of perspective to create empathy and understanding. Her work stems from conversations, eye contact, human connection and movement amidst our increasingly globalized world. She is currently based in Panama City, Panama.
Si caigo en el Canal, nada, nado
Over the last year I have been getting to know an array of complex and sundry characters, their lives all woven into the constructed shores of the Panama Canal.
My open ended search led me to Mr.Brown, a legendary fisherman in Diablo. We sat on the canal edge one morning, waiting for fish to bite when he slipped and fell, toes splashing into the water. His reaction, the title of this series, felt like an unintentional response to the basic questioning that landed me in Panama.
I ventured into this project expecting to find a deep contrast between local existence and a system fabricated to serve global movement. Instead, while documenting my encounters and conversations between the Pacific and the Caribbean, I was affected by how humans and ecosystems have been introduced, rearranged and integrated around the artifice. This work focuses on the blurry line between that which originated here and that which has been designed. I aim to intimately depict a patchwork of perspectives along the edge of a man-made divide. Perhaps it can then be seen from afar, to better understand ourselves and the result of our geography.
To view more of Tova Katzman’s work please visit her website.