In the panorama works I explore figure-ground relations to address the relationship between individuals and the environment.
The Landscape Games project aims to pictorially describe how people and landscape impart a sense of scale and drama to each other. Juxtaposition of panoramic views of landscape with tiny human figure(s) provides a useful strategy to explore the relation between figure and ground and thus re-imagine the representation of space and place in photography. The all-encompassing environment, which seemingly dominates the composition, framing and overpowering the human figure(s), paradoxically reveals how individuals make their own place in the world. Conversely, places are not in the landscape, but in the individuals’ minds and bodily practices.

Heritage Hunters project is about the politics of ruins, specifically the silences of history in the quest for collective meaning and identity within the territory. In Israel, archaeological sites and ruins often serve to confirm a particular collective identity and undermine alternative memories of the past. The ostensibly inert and silent monuments of the past, however, fail to conceal the signs of war and occupation. In my project Heritage Hunters, I confront directly the logic of violence and exclusion underlying the pilgrimage to collective ruins. To make evident the incomplete violent erasure of the past and its ongoing impact in the present, I expose traces of the shooting and digital editing and integrate these traces within the final stitched result. The random shapes of the raggedy undone photo edges reinforce the discrepancies in collective memories of the ruins; the red background draws attention to the violence in their history and the on-going negotiation of their significance.

Conceiving space as movement rather than as a container, I explore how body movement both collectively and individually transforms space into place. In the panoramic Site – Art – Public works, I focus on individuals’ mundane gestures as they interact with public art events or installations. Panoramic stitching replicates the act of creation, reception, selection, interpretation and re-composition. More specifically, stitching a series of shots into a single panorama calls attention to the partial and incomplete perception of space, and the compensating interpretive mechanisms. Thus, the Site – Art – Public works highlight how individuals through their body movement try to mediate the attachment to places in an otherwise abstracted environment.
 
The panorama strategies direct the gaze to the temporal dimensions of my photography -- the act of shooting, pace of shooting and camera movements in space. At the same time, the panorama underscores not only the tension between motion and stillness but also between imagination and realistic representation. The overt traces of the digital process (stitching and editing) dispels any permanence or semblance of realism; rather, they draw attention to the ephemeral, unstable, and unresolved tensions, thereby unsettling the otherwise pastoral landscape.