Josef Koudelka: Wall - Israeli & Palestinian Landscape 2008-2012

Josef Koudelka’s 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 Koudelka’s project is metaphorical in nature—focused on it as a human fissure in the natural landscape. Sometimes blocks of concrete define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive trees—a lifeline for one man, collateral damage in another’s claim for territory—subtly 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 world—not to judge, but to question and to reveal.