YANIR SHANI
This body of work is a summary of an ongoing photographic process, composed from three different series started in 2011, in an attempt to depict the spaces I can refer to as “Home”. It is a visual research, based on personal sources, and looking at the relations between Deadpan Photography, landscape, & the political presence.
The first chapter called “Yehoopez” is a series of black and white images scanned from negatives, which took place in my home town of Beer Sheba. There was an attempt to show the gaps, the fragments, the tensions and the discontinuity, arising from this specific environment, through the visual syntax .One can define the local scenery and the living environment in the pictures as twilight zones, which function as barriers between east and west, old and new, public and private. The Sisyphean connection between the city and the desert is
a main element.
The second chapter is called “The Third space”. It includes large scale color photographs scanned from color negatives and made by a medium format camera between 2011 and 2013.
I decided to explore the area of
“ The 11 Points” in the Negev desert in South Israel.
“The 11 Points” are eleven settlements founded in a large scale operation led by the Jewish Agency in the North of the Negev desert, which was at that time empty and demilitarized, on the night of October 5th 1946. The purpose of the operation was to create a Jewish presence in the area prior to the end of the British Mandate, and the partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs.The space in the images acts as both the place of origin and the utopian prospect of the future, reflecting beyond the present. This duality then defines a third space The Space Between, of wandering, errancy, exile, and trial.
Read The full Article On Israeli Lens Magazine Issue#2
