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)

For the last few years Kremer, a graduate of the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv, has devoted himself to the project "Infected Landscapes" (1999-present). This is a continuous and ongoing examination of the presence of the army in the Israeli landscape and a conscious follow-up of the works by Kuper and Ophir. In some of his landscape photographs he uses the device, common in the 1990s, of blocking the view, and his work is preoccupied with barrier blocks and the Disengagement Wall. His visual language, though, is entirely different, as is evident from his work Training Targets in the Big Rivers National Park (2007). (17) This work depicts the mutilated remains of a jet fighter aircraft standing in the middle of a vast desert landscape, littered with thousands of broken and twisted pieces of metal and spent shells. The open composition, the central protagonist pushed to the middle distance, and the inclusion of the cloudy skies of dusk render it a romantic impression. This picture, like most of Kremer's landscapes, is aesthetic and heroic, and therefore presents an apparent contradiction.

Ben Shalom, a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, solely photographed the landscape of the Golan Heights in the project titled "Battlefield" (2006-present). (18) This territory in the northern part of Israel was captured from the Syrians during the 1967 war. Since then, and although settled and recognized as part of Israel by the government, it has hardly been touched and serves as a training area and firing zone for the army. The landscape is broken by minefields, tank shelters, barbed wire, and ruined villages. In winter, when a lush green carpet covers the minefields and fenced-off areas, it becomes one of the most beautiful and untouched natural regions in the country. The inherent contradiction is reflected in the photographs of Ben Shalom. Her picture of an anti-tank ditch filled with water is a strong example of this dichotomy; it is simultaneously pastoral and disturbing. The huge ditch is a constant reminder of the threat of war, a barrier interposed between the traveler and nature, and a deep scar in the landscape. Ben Shalom's seemingly naive photographs depict the Golan Heights as they are: a vast terrain of anomaly.

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Barak, another a graduate of the Camera Obscura School of Art, touches upon environmental issues in two of his projects. (19) In "Getaways" (2003), he examines the difficulty Israelis have finding a getaway in an almost completely urbanized country by trying to capture and isolate such getaways with the camera frame. In "Earthworks" (2005), he concentrates on quarries. As mentioned earlier, the quarry was a heroic site, and for years Israelis were not willing to admit that quarries are also environmental disasters. Barak's images speak of the expropriation of the soil and touches on the problematic issue that for many years contractors have been disfiguring the landscape irreparably and robbing natural resources of soil and sand in their haste to save on costs and meet deadlines. In his photographs one encounters carefully planned compositions of what look like breathtaking Alpine landscapes. Only a second glance reveals, if at all, that we are actually seeing artificial cliffs blocking the view. Other pictures are more direct as Barak points the camera downward into the quarry's depth to create an inferno-like image.

In his famous poem "Morning Song" (1934), the Hebrew poet Nathan Alterman vowed in the name of the pioneers to his beloved homeland: "We shall clothe you in garb of concrete and cement." Then, this was a typical zealous call by a devout utopist, but in recent years it has become a terrifying reality. The presence of concrete in the Israeli landscape, as we saw above, is very central. It is also central in the work of Assaf Evron, a self-taught photographer working for the Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir who has exhibited his work at various art venues. (20) Evron's photograph Mountain, Hut and Cable (2006) is a highly aesthetic photograph based on a simple composition. The mountain is covered with cement. Evron challenges us by getting close to his subject, thereby repeating the practice of blocking the view. The viewer is confronted with a brutal method meant to prevent landslides, but one that turns Alterman's vision into gruesome reality. The hut at the top of the composition serves as a reminder of transience, a subject that also finds an expression in a series of photographs Evron dedicated to container houses.

Many contemporary Israeli landscape photographs concentrate on paths and dirt roads crossing the landscape. One of Kremer's photographs depicts a panoramic view of a firing zone and national park crisscrossed with endless dirt roads. A careful examination of the picture reveals numerous four-wheel-drive vehicles owned by the Israeli bourgeoisies charging across the landscape on the weekend when these territories are opened temporarily by the army.

In a similar vein, Ickowicz, a graduate of the Musrara School of Photography in Jerusalem, examines a particular dirt path crossing a construction-waste dumping site through which people wearily make their way home, dragging their shopping trolleys through the soft sand, in his series "Load" (2006). (21) Other images present apocalyptic landscapes of winding dirt roads thrusting into the midst of a scorched landscape, burnt due to natural causes or as the result of army maneuvers and warfare. These photographs maintain the "Routes of Wandering" theme, a central and enduring issue in Israeli art. (22) Ickowicz concentrates on settlement, displacement, and estrangement. (23) Many of his photographs, which he calls cultural landscapes, depict figures standing in a landscape. A large number of these photographs from the series "Settlement" (2003-2006) reveal a sense of fierce alienation between the essentially urban Jewish settlers and the land they inhabit. (24)

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Many of Ickowicz's photographs, as well as those by other members of this group, depict ruins. Kremer examines ruined houses in firing zones and in the Golan Heights, and devotes a series of photographs to destroyed or deserted houses seen through a window, in which the dilapidated walls and the peeling paint serve as a frame for the landscapes. The depiction of ruins has become a widespread and significant feature in recent years as it reflects a society troubled by constant fear of persecution, evacuation, and forced immigration. Ickowicz's photograph of an Israeli flag on top of a demolished house in an evacuated settlement summarizes this sentiment.

The new landscape photographers clearly follow in the footsteps of the last generation, particularly in the use of the blocked view as a critical means, yet they have created a new language. They do not depict the Israeli landscape with awe, as did photographers before the 1970s, nor are their photographs as blunt and harsh as those made in the 1990s. Photographers of the 1990s needed to make the point of doing away with the admiring tone. Now that this has been realized, photographers are at liberty to pay more attention to aesthetic values.

The association that some authors find with the Israeli occupation, which "aims to control and reshape" the landscape, (25) is true, but only to a certain extent. The tragedy of the situation in the Middle East, as demonstrated by these photographers, has deeper roots. It rests on the inability of Israelis to change their skin and become attached to the territory, and this is partly why many voices in Israel and abroad speak of post-Zionism.

JOCHAI ROSEN is a lecturer in the department of art history at the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel.

NOTES 1. On the history of landscape photography in Israel see Jochai Rosen, "Landscape Photography in Israel," Contact, Photography and Digital Media, Volume 69 (2004), 12-26 (Hebrew); Guy Raz, Framed Landscapes: A Comment on Local Landscape Photography (Art Gallery, University of Haifa, 2004, Hebrew with a summary in English); Ruth Oren, "Space, Place, Photography: National Identity and Local Landscape Photography, 1945-1963," Spatial Borders and Local Borders (Tel Hai: Open Museum of Photography at Tel Hai Industrial Park, 2006), 164-88. 2. Raz, 7. 3. Yosaif Cohain moved to Israel in 1971. See Eyal Ben-Dov, "Israeli Landscapes, in Black and White, Can Be Political: On the Landscape Photography of Yosaif Cohain," Yosaif Cohain Photographs (Tel Hai: Open Museum of Photography at Tel Hai Industrial Park, 2002), 41-43. Neil Folberg came to Israel in 1976. See Jochai Rosen, "The Landscape Photographs of Neil Folberg," Contact, Photography and Digital Media, Volume 70 (2004), 48-52 (Hebrew). 4. Raz, 14-5. 5. Ben-Dov, 40-1. 6. Yona Fischer, The Rehabilitation of the Nesher Quarry (Jerusalem, 1972, Hebrew). 7. On the heroic aura of the quarry and of stonecutters in Zionism as reflected in art see Gid'on Efrat, "From the Personification of Nature to the Punishing of Nature," Studio, Volume 33, 8 (1992, Hebrew). 8. Raz, 17; Haim Maor, Marked Landscapes: Landscape-Place in Contemporary Israeli Art (Beer Sheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2003), 7, 9 (Hebrew). 9. Ben-Dov, 39; Raz, 16. 10. Rona Sela (curator), Cyclopean Walls (exhibition catalog) (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1995). For a selection of works by Gilad Ophir see www.giladophir.com. 11. The Disengagement Wall has been the subject of endless articles and photographs in recent years. Its historical background, as well as its cultural and political implications, are beyond the scope of this essay. This issue was dealt with recently on the pages of this magazine: see Adi Louria-Hayon, "Existence and the Other: Borders of Identity in Light of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict," Afterimage, the Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 34, Nos. 1-2 (2006), 22-26. This essay includes photographs of the Disengagement Wall by Miki Kratzman and Dana Levy and references to other sources on this topic. 12. "Necropolis: Military Spaces," Refusalon, San Francisco, 1998. For the works of Roi Kuper see www.roikuper.com. 13. Maor, 11. 14. Vered Maimon, "Wide Open Spaces of Unidentity," Sharon Ya'ari (exhibition catalog, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), unpaginated. For a selection of works by Sharon Ya'ari see www.sommergallery.com. 15. Since the late 1990s a few Israeli photographers have taken color landscape photographs, in which they examine in various ways the relation between Israelis and their landscape. Prominent among them are Ori Gersht, Igael Shemtov, and recently Avi Ganor. 16. A striking landscape photographer of this generation not included is Yaakov Israel. His work was presented and discussed recently in a solo exhibition accompanied by a catalog: Naama Haikin (curator), Yaakov Israel: A Repressed Landscape (Tel Hai: Open Museum of Photography at Tel Hai Industrial Park, 2005). 17. For a selection of works by Shai Kremer see www.shaikremer.com. 18. For a selection of works by Noa Ben Shalom see www.noabenshalom.com. 19. For a selection of works by Yair Barak see www.saatchigallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/1504.html. For "Getaways" see www.nogagallery.co.il/meirav-ex.html. 20. For a selection of works by Assaf Evron see www.theheder.com. 21. For a selection of works by Gaston Zui Ickowicz see www.gastonickowicz.com. 22. See Sarit Shapira, Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1991). 23. Argentinean born Ickowicz examined the relations between himself, his family, and his friends and the Israeli landscape in his exhibition "Good Air" (Buenos Aires). See Tal Ben Zvi, "On Gaston Zvi Ickowicz's Buenos Aires," Biographies: Six Solo Exhibitions at Hagar Art Gallery, Jaffa (Jaffa: Hagar Art Gallery, 2006), 22-5. 24. Ariel Hirschfeld, "Structured Destruction--On Gaston Ickowicz's Photographs of the Wall and of the Settlements," The Pale (Ra'anana: Even Hoshen Publishers, 2007), 13. 25. Moshe Zuckerman, "On Landscapes and Human Beings," Shai Kremer, Infected Landscapes, forthcoming (quoted from an unpaginated draft).