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Omer Kaplan is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, originally from Israel. His work explores mental health, identity, masculinity, and sexuality through psychological portraits, experimental videos, and surreal collage. Influenced by personal trauma, Kaplan uses photography as a therapeutic tool, an intimate space to process and validate experiences of loneliness, self-doubt, guilt, and sexuality.
Kaplan's commissioned and editorial clients include the UN Refugee Agency, the Dominican Heritage & Culture Society, and Mercury, alongside features in Vogue Italia, New York Magazine, and Exposure Haaretz. His work has been exhibited at the ICP Graduate Exhibition, PHOTOIS:RAEL, and Miami Art Week. He also presented Narratives of the Afternoon at Soho Photo Gallery as part of the Art Justice show and held a solo exhibition at Studio 18 on the Upper East Side.
Before moving to New York to attend the International Center of Photography, where he received the Director’s Fellowship, Kaplan volunteered with marginalized communities in Israel, teaching art, dance, and music. Rooted in Dadaism and Surrealism, his practice continues to explore intersubjectivity, discomfort, and the shared emotional terrain between artist and subject.
What are you currently working on? Is there any project you would like to share with us?
The Space Between
In 2018, I began documenting myself in hotel rooms, guest houses, and other places I stayed during work and vacations across the U.S., Israel, and the Far East. From American motels and Japanese onsens to luxurious suites in Las Vegas and family homes in Wisconsin, these spaces shaped my perception of solitude and self-expression.
If yes, what inspired the creation of this project?
Through self-portraiture, I explore how my body inhabits and engages with these transient spaces. I confront loneliness and alienation, capturing their varied aesthetics: some starkly generic, others luxurious, and some evoking a longing for the familiarity of home.
Flesh embedded in scented bed sheets, towels, and robes, these photographs explore a longing for an alternative reality rooted in fantasy, where sexuality merges with a sense of freedom, and dreams unfold through performance and play.
How did you first get introduced to photography?
I was first introduced to photography when I was 13 years old, through my uncle. He was photographing sculpted figures in black and white, and I would help him build sets out of cardboard boxes in his apartment in Jerusalem. That experience taught me about light, shadow, and how to construct a scene from scratch. It sparked something in me, I realized how photography could be a tool to both create and make sense of the world.
Over time, the camera became a way for me to process my emotions. I’ve always felt that when I photograph others, I find parts of myself in them. Photography helps me understand myself better and organize my thoughts through a process of self-reflection. It gives me space to slow down, process what I’m feeling, and connect more deeply—with myself and with others.
Can you describe your creative process?
My creative process is rooted in self-exploration, particularly around themes of identity and validation. I work primarily from my home studio, combining analog photography with collage, writing, archival imagery, paint, tear sheets, sewing, and various material manipulations. Much of the work begins with intuition, a feeling or memory that lingers. I often shoot in intimate settings, using past experiences as a stage to explore discomfort, vulnerability, masculinity, and the complexity of self.
Printing in the darkroom allows me to slow down and stay connected to the physical nature of the medium. In parallel, I reconstruct archival materials, interweaving family photographs, handwritten texts, and personal documents. Lately, I’ve been researching poems and writings by my grandparents, using my family archive as both a source and a narrative thread. I also explore the boundaries of imagery, pushing against them through collage, experimental videos, and staged photographic sequences that unfold across multiple frames, inviting nonlinear reading.
I welcome disorder as part of the process. Embracing imperfection, I allow images and materials to shift, collapse, or remain unresolved. My practice isn’t about resolving specific issues, but about reflecting and questioning, drawing from ongoing research in psychology and philosophy.
Are there any artists, not necessarily in the realm of photography, who have left a significant impact on your life and work? This could be someone from the past or someone currently influential.
My work is shaped by a wide range of artists across disciplines who explore the psychological, the fragmented, and the poetic. I’m particularly drawn to those who blur the line between consciousness and the unconscious, or who use the personal as a way into broader questions of identity, memory, and perception.Filmmakers like Chris Marker, Maya Deren, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alfred Hitchcock have influenced the way I think about time, narrative, alternative realities, and tension. In photography, I’m drawn to the narrative structures of Duane Michals, the raw intimacy of Richard Billingham, and the psychological density and overwhelming detail in the work of Roger Ballen.I also look to artists like Joan Jonas, Annette Messager, Anna Mendieta, and Claude Cahun, whose multidisciplinary practices embrace vulnerability and identity. Their work inspires me to use my own archive, body, and history not as static references, but as living materials to be reworked, challenged, and reimagined