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

Josef Koudelka's Wall comprises panoramic landscape photographs made from 2008-2012 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," Koudelka's project is metaphorical in nature-focused on the wall 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 man 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. Wall is part of a larger project, This Place, initiated by photographer Frederic Brenner. This Place explores Israel as place and metaphor through the eyes of 12 acclaimed photographers, who were invited to look beyond dominant political narratives and to explore the complexity of the place-not to judge, but to question and to reveal.

About the Author :
Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, for which he was awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal. He has published over a dozen books, including Exiles, Chaos and Invasion 68: Prague.

Review :
The vistas are resolutely grim, and Koudelka makes no attempt to aestheticize them, yet his sweeping photos are overwhelming. The moral chasm that opens between the sheer impact of the visual and knowledge of what is being depicted is fully intended: an invitation to consider, rather than to simply turn the page in horror and sadness. – The New York Times Here he has produced a remarkable collection of panoramic photos (each 29-by-10-inch spread is a single picture) of the barrier that has been erected over the past decade in defiance of the internationally recognized border. – The New York Times Josef Koudelka's Wall is not a neutral assessment of Israel's construction of a 430-mile barrier separating Israel from the West Bank. His panoramic, black-and-white photographs of the structure and other significant landmarks, made between 2008 and 2012, are disorienting and brutal, utilizing motion blur, angled horizons and perspectives—ranging from expansive to intensely close-up—to contemplate the barrier's material and psychological effects. The captions for the images and other texts, written by researcher and writer Ray Dolphin, by and large focus on the questionable route of the wall and the hardships it's imposed on West Bank Palestinians. – PDN Individually, these photographs of the 'security fence' (as Israelis call it) or the apartheid wall (as it is known by the Palestinians whose lives and landscape are blighted by it) have a stark and spectacular beauty. Taken together they create a daunting feeling of visual incarceration so intense, on a scale so massive, that the sky itself is—by turns—implicated, outraged. – Geoff Dyer, Time