The abused landscape: the works of young Israeli photographers.

For centuries the people of Israel were deprived of a land of their own. Therefore the main goal of Zionism, awakening in the late nineteenth century, was to resettle these people in their ancient biblical land. In the Zionist vocabulary, the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) was described as a huge wasteland waiting for the pioneers (Halutzim) to come and redeem it. The settlers who responded to this call charged the land with messianic zeal and began cultivating it, building settlements, draining swamps, and paving roads. In this burst of enthusiasm the settlers imposed their western standards on the local environment and its inhabitants, thereby ensuring a conflict with both. Territory and landscape are therefore central in the Israeli experience.

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Landscape photography has played a major role through all the stages of the Zionist enterprise in the Middle East. This essay will describe how contemporary Israeli photographers depict the landscape. It seeks to show that their perception of the landscape, stemming from currents within international and Israeli photography, is unique and constructs a phenomenon, albeit in its early stages.

Landscape photography, before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, was mostly created by photographers in the service of Zionist fundraisers who engaged in propaganda, focusing on the process of settling and cultivating the wilderness. (1) A noticeable turn to critical photography as an art form began in Israel in the 1970s. (2) This was the result of various circumstances. First, a wave of photographers immigrated to Israel from the United States, including Yosaif Cohain and Neil Folberg, bringing with them the influence of American landscape photography. (3) Then came a wave of Israeli photographers who returned to Israel in the mid-1970s from studies in Europe and the U.S. and brought with them the visual language common in contemporary international photography and helped establish the first photography departments in museums and art academies in the 1970s. (4) It was also during the 1970s that Israeli photography began a meaningful dialogue with contemporary art. (5) The use of photography by many Israeli conceptual artists contributed to this dialogue and to the acceptance of photography as a legitimate form of art. This period saw the beginning of land art in Israel, and Itzhak Danziger was probably the first Israeli artist to reject the tendency to admire local territory and landscape in favor of a critical-environmental approach. One of his more ambitious projects involved efforts to rehabilitate the deserted Nesher quarry near Haifa. (6) Quarries that had long been heroic sites linked to the building effort were now for the first time treated as wounds on the landscape and as ecological and environmental disasters. (7)

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The Yom Kippur war of 1973 marked a change in Israeli history. The failure of the Israeli defense to respond at the outbreak of this war meant that Israelis who were generally supportive of their leaders and the establishment of Israel had become highly critical. In photography, this criticism would find a definite expression during the 1990s with a new stage in landscape photography. Photographers began tackling such issues as urbanization, overdevelopment, and the expropriation of land by real estate sharks. A major element was the attack on the aggressive presence of the army, whose bases and firing zones violate significant parts of the country, thereby affecting Israeli and Palestinian society alike with the corrupting nature of the continuous military presence. (8)

This phenomenon must also be seen in its international context, for the works of many Israeli photographers in the 1990s continue in the direction of such New Topographics photographers as Robert Adams, Bernd Becher, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, and Stephen Shore. (9) U.S. photographers who experimented with color photography in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on quotidian and evasive beauty, including William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, and Joel Sternfeld, also exerted a significant influence on Israeli landscape photography of the 1990s.

In the first half of the 1990s, Gilad Ophir made direct black-and-white photographs of the building of the new Israeli suburbs, a project presented in the exhibition "Cyclopean Walls" in 1995. (10) His pictures revealed the eclectic and exhibitionist nature of the Israeli bourgeoisie and rendered a new and cynical meaning to the Zionist call to "conquer the wilderness." These photographs showed that in their striving for "quality of life" and a detached house in the suburbs, Israelis indulged in an orgy of tastelessness. It also revealed that in these megalomaniac housing projects, shamelessly imitating almost any style and culture available, Israelis alienate themselves from their surroundings and its culture.

In the second half of the 1990s, a few photographers used a similar visual vocabulary to treat the issue of the Israeli army's presence in the Israeli landscape. Since the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is still one of the most sacred institutions in the country, and since censorship by the military authorities is still common, photographers had to address this issue in a more sophisticated manner. They documented the traces left by the army in the landscape, in the form of deserted installations and tracks of armored vehicles contaminating the landscape, thus touching on wider cultural issues such as expropriation of land and occupation.

Guy Raz deals with the constant efforts by Israelis to avoid contact with the land and its Palestinian inhabitants, hence resolving the conflict by means of roadblocks and bypass roads. His works reveal the alienation between Israelis and their landscape-territory, and between them and their neighbors. Raz particularly addresses the presence of barrier blocks--large, concrete cubes present everywhere on the Israeli landscape. These huge, ugly slabs are sometimes painted with various colors and patterns, which only serves to intensify their dominant presence in the landscape. By focusing on these cubes from up close Raz forces the viewer to consider not only how they block the view but also their implications for our visual culture. The eruption of violence in 2000 dramatically increased the volume of concrete barriers and concrete walls, most notably the Disengagement Wall, and with it the culture of institutionalized or spontaneous art sprayed and painted on them, sometimes depicting a landscape replacing that hidden by the wall. (11)

The issue of the army presence in the landscape was tackled by photographers Roi Kuper and Gilad Ophir in an ambitious joint project titled "Necropolis: Military Spaces," which has been exhibited since 1998. (12) A central theme was the expropriation of land by the army to be used as firing zones. It is thought that firing zones account for roughly a third of Israeli territory. These vast areas are closed to the public, and since actions in these territories are not monitored, the army abuses the land to the extreme. Many photographs in this series depict the twisted and perforated remains of an old army vehicle, left in place and blocking the view. The viewer is forced to stand face-to-face with these victimized corpses symbolizing the Israeli mistreatment of its territory, repeatedly explained and justified by security needs. In many landscape photographs of the 1990s, the view is blocked by a large object located in the center of the composition. (13) In a way, this aggressive means repeats the action of those blocking, expropriating, and violating the landscape. Other photographs depict twisted metal remains of deserted military installations and concrete foundations of abandoned army barracks. The name of the series obviously connects it with the ancient custom of burying the dead outside the city wall in a designated burial ground. The photographs depict the ever-growing dumping grounds of Israel, where Zionist dreams are being buried. Many photographs depicting concrete patterns left on the ground give the impression of traces left by alien spacecraft; others depict a dry and tracked lunar-like landscape, all giving a strong apocalyptic impression.

The photographs of Sharon Ya'ari, taken in the late 1990s, are more subtle images. They depict various landscapes on the outskirts of Israeli cities crisscrossed by paths and dirt roads where people are seen from a distance, sometimes through a thicket, wending their way These photographs examine the relationship between groups of people and their surroundings. (14) Above all, Ya'ari's color photographs give the impression that these people are lost and wander through the landscape aimlessly like modern-day wandering Jews. (15)

Critical landscape photography continues to be a central theme in Israeli photography of the new millennium partly because the younger generation is influenced by the aforementioned photographers of the 1990s. Photographers Yair Barak, Noa Ben Shalom, Assaf Evron, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, and Shai Kremer, all born in the 1970s and already recognized by the art establishment, are good examples of the growing phenomenon of landscape photography in Israel of the new millennium. (16)