Josef Koudelkas Wall comprises panoramic landscape
photographs he made from 2008 to 2012 in East Jerusalem,
Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and in various Israeli
settlements along the route of the barrier separating
Israel and Palestine. Whereas Israel calls it the
security fence, Palestinians call it the apartheid wall,
and groups like Human Rights Watch use the term
separation barrier, the wall in Koudelkas project is
metaphorical in naturefocused on it as a human fissure
in the natural landscape. Sometimes blocks of concrete
define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive
treesa lifeline for one man, collateral damage in
anothers claim for territorysubtly emerge. As in his
Black Triangle project, made in the Bohemian foothills
of the Ore Mountains in the early 1990s, Wall conveys
the fraught relationships between humankind and nature
and between closely related cultures. A chronology,
lexicon, and captions provide context for the
photographs. The book is designed by Xavier Barral,
working closely with Koudelka, and is a coproduction by
Aperture and Éditions Xavier Barral. Wall, with texts by
Ray Dolphin written in collaboration with Koudelka and
project advisor Gilad Baram, is part of a larger
project, This Place, initiated by photographer Frédéric
Brenner. This Place explores Israel as place and
metaphor through the eyes of twelve internationally
acclaimed photographers, who were invited to look beyond
dominant political narratives and to explore the
complexity of the place and its resonance for people
around the worldnot to judge, but to question and to
reveal.
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