Artist Statement

For the last decade, I have photographed everyday happenings in landscapes currently involved in political tension. I then situate them side-by-side to establish a speculative environment of coexistence. The photographs–typically diptychs–represent both my state of mind at the time of capture and a new relationship with time itself. By pairing them in unexpected ways, I form a new syntax by which to “read” or understand time through delicate visual shifts such as weathering, environmental changes, and even changes in my personal headspace or vantage point.

A large focus of my work is on the Jordan Rift Valley, my photographs being taken from both sides of the border. By choosing this location, I create a “common ground” that connects the Israel-Jordan-Palestine triangle. With repeating, place-based color motifs, like the blueish kibbutz’s pool contrasted with the orange-red color of Arava desert rock, I hone in on the very different ways that Israelis settled relative to Jordanians or Palestinians.

I have always seen photography as a social apparatus that can critique institutional power while simultaneously questioning documentary conventions. My goal is to draw attention to the performative aspect of the photographic procedure in order to express my own internal debates, constantly questioning and reacting emotionally to the geopolitical conflicts surrounding me. As constant as I think about those conflicts, the stronger I stir up a perceptive intelligibility that oversteps its chronological markers. The action then gives rise to the dialectic of temporalities and practices. Photography enables a possibility for a singular and paradoxical relationship in the perception and experience of time, first time as I take the image and secondly as the viewer reads it.

I photograph revisited landscapes at different points in time, discomfiting the familiar until the loss of its orientation by repositions of the camera and parallax shifts.