So often on American television the idea of being balanced in a news report is to have two opposing views presented, suggesting that everything can be broken down to two opposing views. It doesn’t reflect the multi-valued nature of reality, especially in a situation as slippery as the one between Israel and Palestine.
One of the people that I met was the Greek Patriarch of
Jerusalem. My question to him was: did he think that what happened in this country over the past 3,500 years was the result of it being somehow a special site on the planet, or do we have a sense that this is a special place because of everything that happened over the past 3,500 years? For him it is the former. And that was my sense too, that there was something unique about the land.
I came to think there was something very special in this land that a lot of people recognised and wanted to claim for their own.
I wasn’t interested in doing the definitive book on Israel and the West Bank. I don’t know if it can be done. I always saw what I was doing as part of a wider project and I felt free to follow my own interests because of this. It would be daunting to try to do a definitive work on such a complex place.
What I read about Israel and the West Bank was about the conflict, which is maybe the chief feature of the country, but it is not all that is there, it is not all of the life of the people who live there. It is a place of relatable, normal lives, but in a charged place.
– Stephen Shore
Each day, L’Oeil de la Photographie will present to you a series by a photographer.
EXHIBITION
This place
From February 12 to June 5th, 2016
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Pkwy
Brooklyn, NY 11238
United States
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org
http://www.this-place.org
http://stephenshore.net
