Borderscapes, as defined by Rajaram & Grundy War (2007), are spaces that are perceived, represented, and lived-in as “a way of thinking through, about, and of alternatives to dominant landscapes of power. They constituted political negotiations, claims, and counterclaims. They are a zone of variated and differentiated encounters.”

Borderscapes series attempts to draw comparisons between an interpretative vision of a place and its "realistic" representation.

It seems as if you are looking at some distant past and at a representation of a war that may have happened. Yet, there is also a sci-fi quality that leaves the feeling you are looking through a portal and catching a glimpse of a possible future.

In “Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature“ William Cronon writes that wilderness is the last remaining untouched place by civilization, isolated from modernity. “…. the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness”.

But wilderness doesn’t stand apart from humanity, ït is a product of civilization at particular cultures and timelines. Looking at Nature is a self mirroring reflections.

William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90.

Metaphors from a Tempus Malum represent an imaginary archive of a journey during the first lockdown, embedded with fragments of monochromatic images of scanned botanic species.

The series was created during the first lockdown of the Coronavirus epidemic when personal space was minimized and there was a sense of an apocalypse.

At that time, I needed a calm reflective space in which I could reflect the feeling of helplessness, fear, and uncertainty. This series seeks to create a metaphor for the corona epidemic based on the natural process of seed dispersal. The imaginary anthropomorphism process aims to deconstruct the stages of the epidemic and find parallel images in plant dispersal.

I started to collect dry plants, seeds, and thorns during the first lockdown on my morning walk that exceeded the permitted range (an act of a personal protest(.

The in-depth observation of plants reflected the course of the epidemic: the spreading phase, the lockdown, the capsules, the mass infections due to public gatherings and death experienced, and the hope for a vaccine.

The choice of scanning rather than photography contributed to the experience of confinement: spending your time in a dark space, in which the scanner light flashes and illuminates the plant samples.

These scans are therefore an attempt to touch objects, minimize them, change and uproot them from their habitats. This tendency to concretization versus abstraction. All images are loaded fragments devoid of their colors, disconnected from the continuum of life, and are now floating in black frightening emptiness.

Thus, scanning seed’s pods simulate states of isolation and social remoteness and the large density of seeds reflects a mass infection event.

These images are all attracted to each other through the power of trauma. The trauma, which constantly stands between the political and the mental, between concrete and abstract, is like a fragment that is simultaneously touching and detached.

This series reflects a personal journey after the first lockdown of the pandemic, characterized by uncertainty. I found myself photographing underground water passages experiencing a frame shift of familiar landscapes. When the image is inverted, there is a stronger emotional correlation to my change in perspective of the strange unfolding events.

The passages are laminal zones, in-between places for self-reflection and places of uncertainty. The inverting process is an intermediate phase between seeing the object and a photographic print. Thus, the negative reflects the presence in the water passages.

The image inversion to a negative creates a three-dimensional effect that surprises me. The negative images resemble giant screens placed in enclosed spaces embedded with a strange and alienated landscape. This mysterious and ambiguous space is not initially recognized as a site for the passage of water, a metaphor for a basic element to sustain life.

The inversion of black and white in these images shifted most of the images from their familiar surroundings and transferred them to the Sci-fi space. It is reflected in the transformation of the light sky hue into dark black tones. The water photographed in one of the images also became a black liquid and alienated from the sky. In most of the images, the grey tones are dominant. Like the passages, they are in between black and white.

The challenging exploration of the passages provided an opportunity for self-reflection. From time to time, I found peace within the shady aisles. I examined the photographs before the transformation and tried to guess what they would look like after the processing. Needless to say, I was always taken by surprise during the image inversion process.

Adding the coordinates is an indexical presence. Thus, inputting image 31.489400 34.937853 coordinates into google maps takes the viewer to an intersection of a roadway with a creek adjacent to the "1949 Armistice Agreement Line". This data creates a further mystery and political interpretation to the passages series, and it is placed in front of the viewer to decipher.

This urban landscape series reflects my anxiety and uncertainty as to how my world was turning inside out during the pandemic events. My question is, would the unfolding changes ever revert to the normal conditions that we once knew?

Dozens of commandos from the Egyptian army’s 33rd Battalion were killed in the 1967 war at No Man’s Land in Latrun (Israel) and were buried in an unmarked mass grave. Their remains are still there, presumably beneath a tract that is now used as a parking area by a tourist attraction.

This series reflects my thoughts on the aftermath, based on a testimony of Ze’ev Bloch, who served as the regional commander. The site, surrounded by pastoral fields and plantations, has no visible marks. I express the horrible trauma with abstract images to reflect the absence of physical evidence.

The silence lasted for over fifty years, and the lack of political action in the field led me to this act of honoring the memory of the dead.

“In the darkness of the dead times,
In the place where Baikal waves
Now roam free and wild…
There were no animals or men:
Only large rocks stood around.
Then grief came down and fell upon the rocks,
And stopped the dance of the faded dreams of olden days

The rocks were buried by the restless Baikal
Born out of their late and bitter tears.”

Aleksander Oborin, 1920’s

Captured during the turbulent months of the COVID-19 pandemic, this series explores the metamorphosis of migrating butterflies as a metaphor for emotional upheaval in a time of profound uncertainty. The transformation of delicate pupae into ephemeral butterflies is juxtaposed with their eventual entrapment in spider webs, where they become mummified remnants of fleeting vitality.

The choice to present these images in black and white is deeply rooted in my photographic style, which I have cultivated over many years. For me, black-and-white photography is a dialogue with the history of the medium, bridging past and present, place and time. There is an enchanting poetic quality to the interplay between light and shadow, a timeless resonance that emerges within the spectrum of black and white. This tonal range distills the essence of the subject, stripping away distractions to focus on form, texture, and emotion.

The polished, marble-like appearance of the butterflies and their cocoons evokes a sense of permanence, contrasting their fragile and transient existence. This interplay between fragility and resilience mirrors my personal dialogue during a chaotic period, reflecting an inner struggle to find balance between movement and stillness, freedom and entrapment. The stark monochrome palette amplifies this tension, emphasizing the delicate beauty of nature’s cycles of transformation and decay.

"Metamorphosis" transforms quiet, natural processes into symbols of strength and vulnerability, inviting viewers to reflect on the fleeting beauty of life and its inevitable entanglement with decay. Through these images, I seek to create a visual and emotional space where the ephemeral meets the eternal, and where the poetry of metamorphosis resonates beyond the frame

Project Description ……….

Image Size problem

Image Title

Nature of Things B

Nature of Things represents an imaginary, metaphoric archive of an ongoing journey, embedded with fragments of monochromatic objects, some of which are ready-made, dead or inanimate, scanned or photographed.

Some of the images were created from samples of plants placed on the surface of a scanner and exposed to its light, in a process reminiscent of the Photogenic Drawings of botanical samples, created by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of photography's forefathers. It also reflects Laszlo Maholi-Naj's Photograms and the Honzo Shashin archives of the Japanese scholar group named Shohyaku-sha. These projects link the current series with the scientific research of the nature of things

Similar to a photogram, the scan is challenging the conventional perception of photography. In this manner, a scan of a pine branch flattened a 3D object to a 2D object, as a photo typically does. In this case, unlike "regular" photography, the object is placed on the photographic surface. The act of photography is converted into an act of scanning and the indexical remote sensing of the camera sensor is replaced by real physical touch. In addition, the light, which the standard camera passively absorbs when it reflects from the object, is replaced with an active-beam scanner.

These scans are therefore an attempt to touch objects on the one hand and try to minimize, change and uproot them from their habitats. This tendency of concrezation versus abstraction is also characteristic of other images in the series that were not created with a scanner. All images are loaded fragments devoid of their colours, disconnected from the continuum of life and are now floating in black emptiness. A squashed tab of an ammunition crate; a tear of a net photographed in an abandoned military outpost; seeds of a rare plant gathered in a botanical garden; a tattooed figure from a dark television series.

While the single frame level shows disconnection and isolation, the process of joining the objects together creates an archive (or series) that seeks to animate the inanimate objects, revive them and reframe their meanings. It seems as though the unified visual of the different objects binds them to a coherent, organized archive; however, these images are all attracted to each other through the power of trauma. The trauma, which constantly stands between the political and the mental, between concrete and abstract, is like a fragment that is simultaneously touching and detached.