Israeli landscape.2013


  • Photographer
    Roei Greenberg
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Roei Greenberg Photography
  • Date of Photograph
    2013
  • Technical Info
    4x5 negatives, digital Scans

This is a journey through the Israeli landscape, examining the relationship between the natural world and the man-made in a land that has been so dramatically changed over the course of history. Each image is a singular peak in this journey but as a series forms a unique point of view, a quiet, pictorial look over a land that is constantly in conflict.

Story

This is a journey through the Israeli landscape, examining the relationship between the natural world and the man-made in a land that has been so dramatically changed over the course of history.
Each image is a singular peak in this journey but as a series forms a unique point of view, a quiet, pictorial look over a land that is constantly in conflict.
The landscape tells a story. As photographers sometimes we choose to ignore the story and focus on the surface - choosing to only see the spectacle of “sublime nature“. But Roei Greenberg combines the two perspectives by creating images that use the accepted structure of the landscape photograph to portray the land as a witness to conflict. For example, the image of the Golan Heights uses a conventional landscape photography technique – the tension between the visual pull of the foreground and background – to feature a pristine meadow broken by the rusted barbed wire fence posts. In the background, hazily, we can see the Syrian side of the land. Despite being an area of intense conflict in the past, this is a tranquil scene in which the barbed wire lazily loops across the flowered meadow and the Star of David hangs precariously off a reinforced post. The image seems to make the past irrelevant, the weeds have physically and metaphorically overgrown this political symbol.
"Road cut" is a view over what is left from a hill which had been cut in order to build a highway to bypass "Tel-Hatzur" the largest archaeological site in northern Israel which in 2005 was recognized as a world heritage site.
In “Trail at Ein Zetim” an overgrown trail is all that is left of the Arab village that once occupied the land. Greenberg’s approach is to contrast the convention of landscape – to present us with otherwise unremarkable images that might be postcards – with simple statements of fact that describe a partial history of the land. He combines the actual state of the land with a history that might extend 50 years back in time. This brings up an uncomfortable fact for photographers seeking to image a “pristine nature”, since the reality is that all of nature is in a constant state of transformation, it is not on the human timetable.
Greenberg’s contextualization of the landscape with words creates a powerful viewpoint that gives the images another dimension that is political and human. They tell the story of the land, and although they are not visible in any of his images, the main protagonists in the story are the humans whose ideology, religion, and political values have had a trans-formative impact

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