Isdud from What Isn’t There

Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA)
Contact Photography Festival 2011, Toronto, Canada

What Isn’t There is a twenty-year-long ongoing project documenting the places where Palestinian villages once stood. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 signaled the end of these villages through force and exile, and since that time, many have gone back to nature. While we occasionally find small signs of past and present habitation, we are more concerned with what truly remains—the unsettling presence of absence.

Positing the limits of landscape photography by engaging spectres, the image that wraps the large wall in the courtyard of the MoCCA is a seemingly picturesque landscape of the port city Ashdod, Israel, which was once the Palestinian village of Isdud.

press

A Photo Fest Takes Over Toronto, article by Carol Strickland for Art in America, May 27, 2011
War Photography Without the Battles, Murray White for The Toronto Star, May 15, 2011
Momento Vitae, Terrence Dick for Toronto Standard, May 11, 2011
Akimblog, Terrence Dick for Akimbo.ca, May 10, 2011
Eye of the Storm, Peter Hugo for Now Magazine, May 5, 2011
Contact Photography Festival 2011, Elena Potter for BlogTO, April 28, 2011