YAAKOV ISRAEL : Legitimacy of Landscape (signed!)

‘Legitimacy of Landscape’ is a visual exploration of Arab, Bedouin and Druze villages in Israel/Palestine, which have transformed into symbols of ‘the other’ in the eyes of many Jewish Israelis and as a result these have slowly lost their place in the visual lexicon that represents this land.  Following in the footsteps of Félix Bonfils and Francis Frith and the pictorial history of the late 19^th century Holy Land, Yaakov Israel ventured out with his 8”x10” camera to document these repressed villages and multi-layered landscapes, which often go unobserved. He discovered that physical and emotional borders are often as confused, jumbled and intersected as the land which has been divided, allotted and re-allotted by the politics of religious and imperialistic power struggles.  In his work Yaakov Israel confronts his viewers with the visibility of these “invisible” landscapes. (These images were made between 2002-2015)