Artist Statement
My works center on outdoor spaces, yet I am not a landscape photographer in the conventional sense of this term. As a photographer, I sense a strong need to face the landscape. My works serve to ask questions about the difference between a "landscape" and a "place." A "place" is defined as an area or volume that contains some sort of landscape, an area that is permanently or temporarily populated – in other words, a space that can be inhabited or traversed.
I examine the relations between these different terms, as well as their potential transformation as a result of their definition and observation from a specific point of view.
In the context of such processes of examination, I find myself waiting on a distant hillside that enables me to observe the Arab village Jat at dusk, or to drive down Road 443 – known as the "Israeli apartheid road," without focusing on the brutal system that has given rise to it, and which is represented by the separation wall and the roadblock. Rather, I choose to capture, with true feeling, a single image that embodies the tension pervading this discriminatory situation, and to capture in a photograph the experience of time and waiting that characterizes the life of Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza.

These works do not include portraits, yet they do capture the presence of human beings. In most cases, the represented figures are photographed from a distance. I do not make eye contact with them, and they appear as part of the place and its narrative. As I wander through a landscape I become familiar with the place, its different aspects, and its cultural and historical status. I tread the line between stranger and tourist, acquaintance and inhabitant. The anthropological and sociological aspect of these journeys is inevitable, and even vital, yet it too is sublimated and undergoes a certain process of estrangement; the manner in which a given place is represented thus does not impose a deterministic stance or truth, but rather remains open, awaiting the viewer's reading.

Having arrived at these sites, it is not surprising that I was drawn to a deeper and more comprehensive concern with one of the most important and charged places in the world, and specifically in Israel – that city of Jerusalem.
The photographs were taken in the area surrounding the walls of the Old City, on their exterior side.
The trajectory I chart is not touristic, historical, or subversive. Rather, it functions as a mirror image or closed-circuit system that presents us, in a sequential manner, with roads that have already been paved, archeological ruins that have been exposed, stories that have been told.

 

Cross-Reference