New Jerusalem

New Jerusalem is a collection of photographic images giving an alternative and fictional view of the holy land.

This series of pictures is the culmination of my seven years living in Israel. It is the end result of a quest to make sense of a location and concept, which has been formed, mediated and packaged through a great multitude of filters. I was motivated to illustrate the questions as opposed to providing answers - to build a platform that highlights our assorted opinions. I had considered that if we were to ask 100 people what Israel is, we would get a myriad of responses. Questions about its borders, history, geography, people, ideology and practices would receive varied and conflicting responses. Those who have never been to Israel as well as those who were born there seem to know “something” about it, and that “something” is very important to many people.

But how is it possible to make sense of a place that has been given to us through stories, cinema, photographs, paintings, newspapers, religion, politics, historical conjecture and folk tales?

All of these images have been manipulated and reconstructed in order to collage, idealize, virtualize, confuse, re-present and re-configure our thoughts about the holy land and its people. All of these photographs were originally made in Tel-Aviv, about an hours drive, depending on traffic, from Jerusalem.