In the late 80s my family was preparing to immigrate from the USSR to Israel, the destination of displaced Jews. As fate had it, while many of our friends and relatives continued on this designated path, we landed in the US, where life took root and unfolded. Recently, I finally reached Israel on my own by way of a twenty year detour. It was like coming home to a life that would have been—a long and roundabout way of arriving at what felt like the heart of the matter. And yet, my journey to get here was hardly a blink of an eye on the timeline of age-long human pilgrimages to this bellybutton of the world. What struck me most, and found expression through my photography, was the vision of Israel as an ancient foundation with the deepest roots in time and yet unstable, mercurial, and transitory.

 

One to Nothing is the body of images I captured while combing through Israel in a rental car. The title alludes to a fight where the difference between winning and losing is vastly greater than a meagre one-point lead. It is an existential battle: the confrontation between the individual and the abyss, where “nothing” is much bigger and greater than any single “one” could be. In either reading of the phrase is a sense of uncertainty. It is impossible to tell whether the competition has just begun, if this is the final score, or if this is an interminable face-off that has no beginning or end, its players locked into eternal opposition.

 

In this place of historic conflict, it is not always clear who is the victor and the victim. To an outsider watching the news, the score may appear easy to tally, but once immersed in the country itself, the struggle takes on daunting proportions and complexities, like a Gordian knot, becoming ever more tightly coiled. Yet, these photographs are not intentionally political. They are not meant to defend a side or critique the problems. Rather, the pictures are removed from the hard facts, and instead are moved by the echoes of conflicts and oppositions that became evident in the fabric of everyday life. They are images showing the immensity of a struggle, the helplessness of the individuals in its midst, and a beauty that seeps through the tension.