PERVERSE FOREGROUNDS
(2019-2023)
“the difficulty of getting a view satisfactorily in the camera: foregrounds are especially perverse; distance too near or too far; the falling away of the ground; the intervention of some brick wall or other common object … what pictures we would make if we could command our point of views”. Francis Frith, 1859.
When exploring the relationship between landscape and imagery, it's essential to recognize that landscapes are first constituted in consciousness. Freud suggested that conscious thoughts and feelings transfer into the unconscious, a process he likened to a mystical writing pad. This pad's surface can be erased and reused repeatedly, yet subtle imperfections and traces of previous activity remain, unnoticed by the user. Freud uses this analogy to illustrate how our unconscious retains remnants of past experiences, shaping our memory, thoughts, and perception.
In the work Perverse Foregrounds, a series of black-and-white photographs using large-format cameras, I study these themes in the Jordan Valley, in the northern West Bank. Here, a dormant quarry disrupts the landscape, a site where heavy trucks, decades ago, removed and transported the earth to build in Israel. The trucks left behind invisible, latent impressions on the land, while the turf, boulders, and patterned growth reveal the quarry's activities from decades past.
These photographs capture the tension between what is visible and what remains hidden, between the present and the traces of the past, emphasizing how landscapes—and our perceptions of them—are shaped by power, memory, and the unconscious and nature’s ability to act forensically.