This Place
Mentioning the West Bank is tantamount to inviting an argument, even thousands of miles from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. While the multi-national group of 12 photographers involved in This Place, a large-scale project organized by photographer Frédéric Brenner to explore the complexity of this contested region between 2009 and 2012, doesn’t shy away from provocative imagery, the artwork resists many pitfalls of political antagonism and propaganda. This Place is an unsentimental lesson in empathy, remarkable for its neutrality and overall tone of level-headedness.
In an effort to bring this material to college campuses for scholarly engagement, the full traveling exhibition is currently divided between four liberal arts institutions: Colgate University, Skidmore College, Hamilton College and the University at Albany, State University of New York.
At Colgate University’s Picker Gallery, award-winning Czech/French photographer Josef Koudelka presents panoramic photographs of the Israeli-built Wall in the West Bank as an accordion-fold strip that fills a 49-foot-long case and diagonally bisects the gallery space. Koudelka’s black-and-white images are ominous and tragic, yet they are also neutral in a documentary sense, making visible both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the Wall.
British photographer Nick Waplington’s color portraits of Jewish settlers in the West Bank explore multifaceted otherness. Many of the settlers depicted are English-speaking expatriates from Britain, Canada and the United States, who are not only alienated from the Palestinians they have displaced, but from left-leaning Israelis. An untitled portrait of the Tequo family evokes both tenacity and uncertainty through a fragile sapling and haze-shrouded horizon—two thin lines that nonetheless create a coordinate that pins the family firmly in place.
Rosalind Fox Solomon and Thomas Struth, the two remaining photographers included in Picker Gallery’s portion of This Place, likewise explore the portraiture and architecture of this region, respectively. All four adequately convey their own anxieties and discomfort with the situation through the photographic lens. Still, there is little condemnation or preaching on view, save in Koudelka’s obvious outrage against the Wall. Yet even Koudelka has insisted on noting four words he witnessed in West Bank graffiti: “One Wall, two prisons.”
Image: Nick Waplington, Untitled, chromogenic print, 18 x 22″ framed. © Nick Waplington.