COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS
(from 2009)
The intersection of ideology and photography was central to the creation of a sense of place in pre-state Israel. In the early 20th century, pioneers in settlements and kibbutzim used photography not only to capture historic moments but to disseminate ideology, turning the photograph into a tool for asserting identity. To photograph the new was part of the making of a place.
Since 2009, I have been photographing in Israel and the West Bank with an 8x10 plate camera. The decision to place myself within the landscape and to document its shifting grounds allowed me to witness the action of the state in constructing spaces, which allowed me to navigate my own relationship to the conflict and the hidden histories of the occupation. The interplay of identity and the invisible forces shaping and constantly transforming the environment became the main them of the works as I became aware that the landscapes and what becomes the public sphere is produced with visible political interventions and modifications. The experience of documenting a reality which constantly appears as incomplete became a space that set the foundation of my interest in photography and allowed me to think of photography as something that reflects on invisible futures as much as the past and present.
The images reveal fractured landscapes caught between civilian and military realms, capturing the violence inflicted on the land where natural elements and human intervention collide. Ultimately, this work is an exploration of the incompleteness that so often defines this landscape. Through these images, I probe the tension in a place where nothing is fully formed—where the notion of ‘becoming’ becomes apparent. The land, both physically and metaphorically, remains incomplete, suspended in a state of flux.
Each photograph operates in a space between fact and fiction, reality and its alternate version. By deliberately observing "outside the event," I capture moments of latent transformation—when the land reveals itself, its pulse still malleable, and its reality still in flux. These images suggest the emergence of a mundane reality, hinting at what might have been and what could be.
What constitutes these photographs is not a romanticised vision of the landscape but a fragmented reality. These are not monumental landscapes but offerings of a gaze into a world on the brink of becoming—raw and brutal. The language of incompleteness reflects not only the land itself but also our cognition of images. This is encapsulated in the work Headless Lighting Poles (2010), where a street is shown in its unfinished state, still under construction, displaying the subjects in a form that would otherwise be erased from our consciousness, and the significance od making of a place would not be apparent (it world just be a photograph of a place or a street). But when the street is seen in its incompleteness, when the act of making of a place becomes visible, we are encourage to ascribe meaning to it and simultaneously to question it.