Judaean Desert

A desert is never exactly what it seems – as empty, barren as dead. The Judean desert, with its stark taupe hills, is a venue for tourism, for army exercises, or for salvage and prospecting forays young people who turn up rockets from the Gulf War, or even rusted armaments from the Israeli-Egypt war in the early 1970s. In these images we see the Army putting its recruits through an exercise in rock climbing, the punishing heat as a young boy covers his head with his shirt, the mute and positionless outcropping of stones.

Abandoned structures lie in the desert, as the sand consumes them. Rusting, purposeless, they look as if they may have once served a military purpose, but are now no more then empty architectonic structures that remain us of the fait of a historic landscape. This is one of the oldest and most recorded landscapes on earth, the biblical desert of the old and new testaments. With its rough, corroded exterior, it expresses the tension between life and death, as much as a place of tourist interest as the dead sea lies just over the horizon as a natural resource that extends into an unify landscape between Israel and Jordan.