Entry Title: " Serial No. 3817131"
Name: Rachel Papo, United States


Story: At an age when social, sexual, and educational explorations are at their highest point, the life of an eighteen-year-old Israeli girl is interrupted. She is plucked from her home surroundings and placed in a rigorous institution where her individuality is temporarily forced aside in the name of nationalism. During the next two years, immersed in a regimented and masculine environment, she will be transformed from a girl to a woman, within the framework of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict. She is now a soldier serving her country, in a military camp amidst hundreds like her, yet beneath the uniform there is someone wishing to be noticed, listened to, and understood. Almost fifteen years after my mandatory military duty ended, I went back to several Israeli army bases, using the medium of photography as a vehicle to re-enter this world. Serial No. 3817131 represents my effort to come to terms with the experiences of being a soldier from the perspective of an adult. My service had been a period of utter loneliness, mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all. Through the camera's lens, I tried to reconstruct facets of my military life, hopeful to reconcile matters that had been left unresolved.

Rachel Papo was born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine arts high school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen, she served as a photographer in the Israeli Air Force. She earned a BFA in fine art from Ohio State University (1996), and an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2005). Rachel's photographs are included in several public and private collections, including: The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston. Her images have been exhibited and published widely. Exhibitions include the Griffin Museum of Photography, Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, 92nd Street Y, and Hebrew Union College Museum, New York. Her photos have been published in magazines worldwide, including in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Israel, France, Spain and China. Rachel has been awarded a 2006 NYFA Fellowship, was selected as a finalist for the 2006 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, and received the 2006 Ronnie Heyman Prize for an Emerging Jewish Visual Artist. Rachel's first book, Serial No. 3817131, was published by powerHouse Books in 2008. She is represented by ClampArt Gallery in New York City where a solo exhibition was on display in February 2009.