 Good evening everybody. Welcome. Thank you for coming to the Brooklyn Museum. My name is Cora Michael. I'm associate curator of exhibitions here and also the organizing curator of this place, which presents Israel and the West Bank through the eyes of 12 international photographers. This monumental, ambitious art project was spearheaded by artist Frederick Brenner, who I am very pleased and honored to welcome tonight in the first of a series of four programs comparing artists with writers and historians. Frederick will be in conversation with the bestselling novelist Nicole Kraus as together they discuss identity, otherness, longing, belonging and exclusion and the ways in which fiction and photography approach storytelling, character and metaphor. Born in Paris, Brenner studied French literature and social anthropology at the Sorbonne. He began photographing at the age of 19 as he set out to capture the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem's Mayeshirim neighborhood. From there, Brenner brought into his examination of portable Jewish identity to include the entire world, a project that culminated in the publication Diaspora, Homelands and Exile, which was also a major exhibition which I'm proud to say we hosted here at the Brooklyn Museum in 2003. Brenner was not only the initiator of this place, but he also participated in the project as a photographer. His work from Israel and the West Bank which is collected in a monograph entitled An Archaeology of Fear and Desire represents an attempt to examine Israel as place and metaphor and to look anew at a territory where quote, the maps of the sacred overlap compete and ultimately exclude each other. Brenner's images address the myths and fantasies that construct individual identity, but which serve ultimately to alienate us from each other and from our own humanity. Nicole Kraus has been hailed by the New York Times as one of America's most important novelists. She is the author of the International Best Seller's Great House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and the History of Love which won the Sarian Prize for International Literature and Francis Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger and was shortlisted for the Orange, Medecis and Femina Prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks into a Room was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007 she was selected as one of Grant's best young American novelists and in 2010 chosen by The New Yorker for their 20 under 40 list. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and Best American Short Stories and her books have been translated into more than 35 languages. The History of Love is being made into a major motion picture which will be released in 2016. Please join me in welcoming Frederick Brenner and Nicole Kraus. So I'm very happy to be here tonight speaking with Frederick who I only just met recently. But in a sense it makes absolute perfect sense that the two of us should be in conversation I think about this work because it seems to me that we're both clawing in our work towards similar ideas or at least driven by a similar curiosity about our identity. So I've never spoken much about photography but I have spoken a lot about storytelling and I think a lot about storytelling as do you. And I really think today we're here as two storytellers and two Jews were raised in the Diaspora who in our examination of the Diaspora have found ourselves and have drawn back over and over to the source and the story or many stories both ancient and contemporary of Israel itself. So if the story were simply linear it would be a lot easier to tell I think and maybe it would interest us a lot less. If the story were simply the reverberations of exile and the tracing of fragments back to a lost original whole. Or if the story were simply circular if Jewish existence exploded into so many shards had been fully gathered back into its original vessel that too would I think be an easier story to tell. But it's neither and it's both and the story doubles back over itself so many times that the effect is often dizzying. I think of your first project in which you speak of a kind of origin of 35 years of subsequent work was an exploration of Mayor Shariim a neighborhood in Jerusalem of ultra-Orthodox Jews recreating the Diaspora within Israel. So one element of the doubling effect is that you and I are both in effect storytellers exploring a people whose very existence in the absence of a certain physical reality a nation and a land it on their ability to maintain and transmit a highly complex identity through the centrality of text. And part of the magic of that to me is that the very early Jewish discovery of the ways in which these texts designed to remind us of who we are and where we came from also provide an enormous opportunity for self-invention. So one could say that the reason we continue to live or some of us try to live on this contested scrap of land today is actually because of a story which we began to write about ourselves in that place more than two millennia ago. So in the 8th century BC Israel was actually, does anyone want to turn off their phone? In the 8th century BC Israel was actually nothing, it was a backwater nation compared to the neighboring empires of Egypt or Mesopotamia and that's I think what we would have remained forgotten were the Philistines and the Sea Peoples except that we began to write. So the very earliest Hebrew writing we found dates to the 10th century BC around the time of King David and those were just really simple inscriptions on buildings, really just record keeping. But within a couple of hundred years something really extraordinary happened and by the 8th century BC the Jews were composing the Torah. So we like to think of ourselves as the inventors of monotheism but actually we didn't really invent the idea of a single god, we only really wrote our story of our struggles to remain true to him and in doing so we actually invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and we inscribed ourselves into the future. So in a sense when you think about it it can sound a little bit like Jewish public relations but actually what we're talking about is much larger than perception, it's really the idea of self-invention. So when the Jews began to compose the central texts on which their identity could be founded they were enacting a will and consciously defining themselves, actually inventing themselves as I think no one had before. And a measure of the success of that story is its centrality in simply every aspect of western culture. So one might argue that the modern state of Israel is the culmination of the Jewish people's instinct to invent and reinvent themselves. It's a place that's riddled with the conflicts born in the world, maybe a confusion between the creation of something new and the recreation of something lost. It's a place that both promised both the creation of a new identity according to Zionist ideals and the recreation of a lost past. So I wanted to start with the title of this project, This Place in Hebrew Makomze. It's resoundingly physical. This place here, the ground beneath us is this world and no other. And it is in the language of Jewish thought profoundly metaphysical and spiritual because echoed in Makomze is Hamakom, which is the place, which is one of the ways that Jews refer to God. He is the place of the world, but the world is not his place. Because according to Jewish mysticism, God, the infinite Ainsaw, had to withdraw himself, creating an empty space for the existence of a finite world. So to me, the title you chose reverberates with the complications of a place that is at once physical and spiritual, a presence built out of an absence, a here that holds the echo of there, a reference to the singular that holds within it the presence of a great plurality. So I wanted to know how you arrived at the name and whether it was there from the beginning. Thank you. Thank you for this beautiful introduction. The name was not here from the beginning. It's exactly the reason why we ultimately choose this name. The project started with a kind of title of a work in progress. So it was called Israel, Portrait of a Work in Progress. And the title which was Provisory remain, you know, four years later, five years later, we were still with this title. And on one side I was concerned, and we were concerned that the word Israel would not really be inscribed in the title, because I wanted to unplug the possibility that people will mistake the project for what it is not. And so we gathered and we had a first reunion trying to sing what kind of title, and we came, you know, 12 photographers to decide of one title. At some point I, some people like the an archaeology of fear and desire. I had thought of also another title, the land I will give you to see as the title an archaeology of fear and desire as a subtitle. And then during this reunion we came with the title Seam. I think of the Museum of the Seam, right? Yes, exactly. And we kind of, we all agreed. And then a few months later one of our curators who traveled around the land said, you know, everywhere people, when they mention Israel, they use I mean they use this place. And what is very interesting in Israel is when people speak with euphemisms so they never speak about the conflict. They say the situation. And this is part of the denial that you need in order to wake up in the morning and face this unbearably dissonance and complex reality. And so we sort of it and say, well, this place, this place. And then of course this place is Makom in Hebrew, which is almost the same in Arabic. And then we kind of work out a logo where you could have the three alphabets. Because again from the beginning I wanted this project to be a communicable project because Israel is really the place where the particular and the universal meet. And so we ended up with this place. You said that the beginning of any project is always about wrestling. Which is also a very Jewish concept, I think, wrestling with everything you could possibly think of to wrestle with. You said that the wrestling for you has to do, what is the story I really want to tell and how am I going to tell it? The first photograph that you took for this project or what you call the first photograph I don't know if chronologically it actually was, was of the palace hotel and I think that I can do this and it will come up. You've spoken a lot about this photograph as being the key to the rest of the work in this project. And you told me about the day that you were scouting for locations for some of the other photographers. Which required an enormous amount of time and effort and we can talk about that later. And you saw this, this is actually the facade of a hotel, this is sort of the back of it. So you sort of saw this construction site through the inside through the open door. You saw the trucks going out. You went in and you were drawn to it. Initially you thought of it as something that you could give maybe to Thomas Truth or one of the other photographers who more often work with architecture and your assistant said why would you give this away? Why are you going to give it away? This is for you. Was it a moment when you understood something about what story you wanted to tell or did the palace hotel suggest to you a way that you could tell the story? I think that this process is very intuitive. I didn't know what I was doing while being attracting by this place. I never photographed architecture before. I mean I look at it, I enjoy it, but I kind of, the working hypothesis that I had carved over a period of a year meeting with the potential artists who were joining the project and the people who founded the project brought me to a kind of idea of the portrait I wanted to create. But I ended up taking a photograph of this very, you know, of this I don't know of this facade which seems to be maintained with forceps and a kind of coliseum. It's only much, much later that I understood why this photograph was important. It was important because up until now I had only photographed in black and white. I made one photograph in colour in my entire 25 years journey. And so, and I didn't know at that time when I started the project whether I would photograph in black and white and in colour. I mean the working hypothesis take a long time. I'm first nesting and then I'm kind of building a scaffold and then I would jump. But it was would I use a medium format, a regular format, digital, large format, colour black and white and slowly, slowly you narrow down what you want to do. And then this photograph obliged me to jump. But I never thought that I would use this photograph. I took this photograph and after I took this photograph I was at least 70% sure that it would be a colour project. I took some black and white of this photograph but retrospectively I decided not only to use this photograph, this photograph opened the book before even the book starts. It's the kind of key which helps which should help each viewer to decipher each other image which is in the book. And so it's a very important image and maybe when you see the other images you will understand better. I don't know, I'm going to push you a little further if you don't mind. Yes, this is the only interest of this encounter. I heard you say that quite a few times. We talked about this photograph together but I don't know that you ever articulated the nature of that key. Let's look at this photograph. One of the things that I am struck by is the monumental quality of it but it's fragility. The fragility of this place and the enormous overwhelming effort to hold up something which probably should have been allowed to fall into, finalize its ruined state. So these endless girders and the hollow quality of something that we are looking at from the inside and we can only imagine what the view is from the outside. There's enormous effort from back here to hold this place up and there's something a little disturbing about it, about this sort of hollow empty space. I don't know if I'm getting at something of the key that you are describing or not but maybe you could be more literal. It's interesting. My English is very French, very approximate. But the other day I didn't know the word tenuous in English and I asked what tenuous is about and we've been speaking Matt Brogan who helped me to pull this project together and what I would say to hold it together with 12 very strong personalities which is both about a metaphor for the project and for this place and I think that in this photograph there are opposites. I mean what is difficult about this place is that there are all the oppositions are here and this photograph in a way summarized that but I would say it's only the reading that I have today. I love poetry and I love particularly one poet that I keep quoting, Pessoa and when I made this photograph I didn't know that exactly but I wanted to use a quote in my book. I wanted to use many quotes as an epigraph. My publisher only allowed me to have one Pessoa in his book of Disquited say shadows made of flies both hollow in the inside and in the outside and this is very much what this photograph for me speaks about and then when you'll see the other photograph it's all about the roles that we take on, all identity as a fiction and the fiction of identity and this photograph is here to remind us of that. So in this way this photograph is the key to decipher the rest which are just about human landscape and human landscape and landscape and the correspondence between one and the other. It's interesting, I thought about that Pessoa quote a lot and it's beautiful but the other way to talk about that lie is what I was referring to in the beginning of this talk which is self creation or self invention and it's a fine line between the lie of who we are and the invention of who we are. I think again this is both your work and the other 11 photographers work are not only about Jewish existence there about the many existences, the many radical existences of otherness but from my own writing, my own perspective I go back to the Jewish element of this and there I would say that our entire existence according to Pessoa is a kind of lie which is to say that from the beginning we really, we fashioned ourselves. I would say it is a lie when we mistake the invention for what it is not. When we forget that our identities are invented it's a lie but it's not exactly what you say a thin line between invention and lies. But then when we worship those inventions we forget that they are inventions. Then this is what we call Avodazara or fetishism and Israel offers so many examples Moshe Halbertal with one of the person who met with each of the photographers speak of Jerusalem at the ultimate place of idol worshiping and fetishism. I once had the pleasure of being taught Talmud by Moshe Halbertal. Only one session so I didn't get very far but he's a great teacher. You can push me further. I take a last word on that which is I think I take a certain kind. I find there's something to be very moving about this power. I don't see it as lying per se but this power to sort of write ourselves or decide how we are portrayed and then to somehow live that story. I think that we are endlessly finding ways to escape out of the story which we have closed around ourselves. This is a hopeful way of looking maybe an overly American way of looking. But I do think that there is some sense in which we'll talk about this later in your work although one feels the quality everywhere in Israel in your work and the other factor of entrapment. There is also because of the long history of escaping into the next and the next. The next I think there's also some hopefulness about it as well. What about the specific title of your body of work within this project? An archaeology of fear and desire? I think the element of desire in Israel and the West Bank, all of it the longing and the yearning, that to me seems very obvious. But I wonder if you could talk more about the element of fear. For me fear prevails on desire. Much of the desire is created within the fear. But I would say it's always about wrestling. I would use another couple, fear and desire, wrestling and embracing. This is what happened in this land all the time, everywhere. Between everybody and within everybody. And that's what I'm trying to, that's what touched me. And also in terms of opposite, this incredible tenderness that you find in Israel and this incredible violence. And how the two are always together, always interwoven. Did you find, I think of those tensions between those, that tension for me as part of what continually draws me to want to write about not just Israel, but Israelis. There's something about the way in which all boundaries feel dissolved when you are amongst them, that you feel so close to the rawness of life. But in some ways it's a little bit misleading because part of that comes from the protectiveness, the fear of perhaps the other. So there's the need to assertion of the assertion of opinion. You can't find more opinionated people than this small scrap of land filled with them. But there's something to me that is endlessly fascinating about being among that. And I wonder whether you found that taking pictures, after taking pictures of Jews all over the world, whether there was something different about photographing Israelis in that brutal frankness or directness or not. Yes, I think what is remarkable about Israel is that things come out. Reality is more raw, more naked. And I would say even in my work it's more naked than it was in diaspora. In diaspora I worked a lot with metaphors. Here I'm much more in what I would call the pshat, the first meaning. There are four level of meaning, pshat, remez. And here my photographs are more much simpler also. Simpler in the sense of simplicity being the complexity resolved. But there are all those layers of... The difficult exercise for any photograph is to really do a lot of field work not to try to impose my reality but to let something emerge and then to try to multi-layer the photograph. To construct it as multi-layer as possible and then to deconstruct it and to get to a kind of such simple expression where everything is here. How do you do that in a moment of taking a photograph of a subject that you only have this short amount of time? Because I do spend a lot of time talking with them. The closer you get to people the more intimate you are. And try a lot of observation. It's both listening as much as seeing for me. Ultimately it is translating in an act of seeing and recording. But it is both listening and seeing. Your sense of Israel in the West Bank is a place of radical otherness. A place where one identity can exist without being questioned or opposed by another identity. And the tension of the opposing forces rubbing up against each other. So in order to really portray or examine that you felt that you wanted to add another layer of otherness. And to invite the outside gaze of what ended up being 11 other photographers to this project. And I'm wondering given that this is a place and a subject that you have spent so much of your artistic life thinking about how difficult or perhaps how easy was it for you to in a sense give up control of the subject or the story. And to allow it to be told by other people with whom you might not share the same perspective. I think that I initiated this project maybe with a secret desire to ultimately surrender and trust. And I told every single photographer before even we started that each person which will join the project will definitely grow artistically, intellectually and emotionally. And if it is true, it's true for me. And the great blessing for me has been to wrestle from the very beginning before the very beginning and slowly to be able to embrace. And to embrace precisely alterity, otherness, the unknown. And it was a very big journey for me. Because it was really a carte blanche given to all the photographers and the photographers were concerned at the beginning that whenever you hear Israel you hear propaganda. So those people were legitimately afraid to maybe be instrumentalized. And so it took like about eight months to a year for people to really convince that it was indeed a genuine invitation and an opportunity for them to keep pulling the red thread of their own oeuvre. But it was difficult. But eventually I started to embrace. And that's incredible. What did you offer them? I mean when they came how did you create a platform from which they could look at this place without so to speak giving them leading questions? Very difficult slowly I would say the project. I had intended to be a little more directive than I was, than I became. But the first mission taught me a big lesson. And I then decided rather than to have different guides to really open the project to all kind of actors of Israeli society from architect to psychoanalyst from social workers to archaeologists plural. And I decided to enable those artists to travel first during their exploratory missions which took about two weeks through the largest possible spectrum of narratives to get those people totally confused but on a very high level and out of this vacuum that they were facing they were able to define what they wanted to do and then later on what would be the vectors of the portrait they would like to draw. And were there photographers that you invited initially that in the end you felt were not right for the project or were there things that you wanted to keep out of the project or were you simply open to anything and everything? At the beginning I was open to everything but I had said that I knew that one thing would disqualify a photographer which is anger. Anger is always looking for a prey and Israel the West Bank is the easiest, is the most incredible field for enabling that to happen. So those and some people went on an exploratory mission and eventually didn't take part in the project. I had the great luck of being able to go to Israel with a guide that Frederick had handpicked for one of the photographers, Jung Jin Lee. It was a kind of remarkable experience. This is a young woman who took me out to the desert which I'm interested in. Right now I'm writing about it in my own novel The Judean Desert and the Negev. And she told me a sort of wonderful story about how you had found her and interviewed her, which I assume you must have done 11 times over for each of these photographers not to mention all the other people you found to help them. It must have been a massive operation. And I interviewed 30 potential assistants that were already recommended by another screening from the director of the school of Betzalel, the art school, the school of photography. Right and well Galit told me this story that you had called her up and said well I'd like to know whether this might work. Why don't you show me something or someplace that you like. This was the test to find out whether this was, I guess somebody who could play the role of bringing these photographers into this place without directing them overly but being able to just put them in the way of the right accidents. And she said that you had come to her studio and she had decided simply to take you to the beach and at first you were almost put off. So you took me here but slowly you began to look and you began to understand and I think you made a great choice by hiring her. She was remarkable. I think that's one of my greatest accomplishments in this project. The way I was able to team together two great human beings and those people became real couples. I mean Junjing and Galit or Joseph Kudelka and Gillard and while it was obvious that those to be photographers who knew what studied in their book of photography Thomas Truce or other photographers but what was admirable is that eventually the photographers learned a lot from their assistant and up until today they are in contact and some work for some of the other photographers but it was a big investment in term of time since I wanted to really see what those people that I was hiring were having in their belly because the entire idea was to open a non-dual perspective to try to look beyond the political narrative and it was important for me to see if those people had this large perspective. So we can talk about the work of the other photographers endlessly but really I think tonight is about your work. I'd like to show another one of your photographs. This is you sometimes refer to as the second photograph of the project. It is indeed the second photograph chronologically that I took. Chronologically and the story you told me is of being exhausted one night and of your partner having been invited to this Shabbat dinner at the family of the home of the Weinfeld family and it was the very last thing that you wanted to do and somehow you were convinced to go and when you entered into this family home you were really overcome by this site of this really impressive, very dignified Orthodox family. I wondered thinking back to your early work from when you were 19 where it all began what you saw in them or perhaps how you could portray them that suggested you use something different and new to say about an ultra-Orthodox re-creation of the diaspora in Israel a story that was maybe other than the one you told in your first project in Manichur. Again I would say the first two photographs were so improbable to photograph architecture and there was one thing I was sure I would not deal with is this kind of neo-hacidism I mean the orthodoxy because I had spent when I was between 19 and 21 I did a I photographed over a period of three years the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem and you know this re-creation of a state in the heart of Jerusalem in the heart of the Middle East and I was not likely to go myself I mean to go again this was done and entering this room seeing this extraordinary table and the family around the table I had said I need to make a photograph of that it was Friday night so I met with them later I just managed to convince them to take part in my project and with this photograph I knew the project would be only in color so it's another thing but I was already very aware that it was already one more layer than what I had done 25 years earlier it was really what I was photographing was a residual of diaspora in the heart of the Middle East this family could be in New York or in Antwerp and for me this photograph is really when I decided to do it I say this is the dream already dreamt but it's an important photograph and eventually it became an important photograph for me it feels so painterly I mean it could be a Vermeer Dutch 17th century painting and when you look at it it feels so perfectly choreographed down to the footwork of the boy and I wondered to what degree these portraits are choreographed and to what degree they are an accidental I know it's some of both but maybe you can actually just tell us a story about this the moment in which you photograph them and how they came into this formation and what you asked them to change and what you didn't ask them to change I mean photography is a collaborative and performative process I always describe myself as a midwife for the people that I photograph as well as they are midwife for me and I'm doing that just to learn more but I always choreograph it with them basically they sat where they sit usually on Friday night and I decided to do it on a Friday so the table would be dressé and then the magic happened and the more people you have in a family portrait the more difficult it is because you have to lift those 10 people and it must be one breathing all together and I photograph with a large format so you can only have 20 photographs maximum and you have children so it's very difficult how they will not move and that but the moving is also you need to take advantage of everything and what I love are of course what I discovered ballet with the feet of each person and the feet of the table and you know the I mean I was prompted to make this photograph because one of the daughter was getting married so they would be one less person around the table and it was good that I did that because then of course each photograph that I had start to draw the contour of the portrait that I want to create and thinking about how you began by using the camera to document but then move to making art with it I mean to what degree where is the line between where you are documenting this family or where you are also inventing a story about them that may not be the story that they would tell maybe in this image but perhaps there are other images where it wouldn't be the story and to what degree does that tension feed the work for you do you feel how much do you feel it this is this tension that you're talking about and I would say the more I accept and embrace my own subjectivity the more the work become really a work which speaks far beyond me and that's what I try to find each I mean in each photograph do you fear and think not this but we'll just move forward in this photograph for example is there any I remember when you spoke to me about it you said that this was just you know an example of taking what did you say exactly of taking this photograph for me is really about how people have mistaken the text I mean the book our book the Bible for a book of geography for a book of geography and so I wonder in that sense you have your own sense of how of the choices that this man the patriarch of this family has made and about their lives and yet you also have to you must be open to them and how they see themselves and to what degree do you worry or have you had the experience of someone you photographed later looking at it and saying this is actually I don't like what you've seen here and what you've made here I tell you something again a photograph is a journey and I know only after having spate first there's an intuition I meet the people and then I spend a lot of time with them and then I have a feeling of where I want to take them but I know that the place where they would lead them where they will lead me to is a far better place than the place where I thought I would lead them so it's a kind of conversation it's a kind of dance together and for example for this family I met them at an earlier stage because I knew a professor at Beth Salel who was teaching photography whose wife is a midwife a true midwife not like me a midwife for orthodox women who live in settlements they are such a narrow niche like that and she basically performed about 60 you say delivery in English and so she took me to this family and it was like the landscape is exactly the same it was 2000 years ago and he really has a flock and I spend a lot of time with them I went back they are four brothers and they study at Sryok they wake up very early they study the Zohar together etc and I went with him in the morning when he was taking his flock out and I thought yes I should really have a photograph with them and so because of the light I decided to do it late in the day and then I didn't exactly intend to have them I mean his face is a surprise because eventually one of the animal just run in the wife and I'm starting to run in the wife and I mean she was just you know caught up by surprise and you know starting to cry and then the light was starting to go down and over it where it would be almost impossible and you can see his face shouldn't have been like that I mean I didn't intend to have it like that and you know there was maybe you know it was taken already the sun was over but far over and because of technical reasons it almost couldn't happen and then and I remember my assistant the flock started to run from each side so he had to bring them together and so this is the anecdote but which make the photograph what I love about that story is that what you caught in his face is his protectiveness right of his wife she's just been hurt he's ready to just demand in the project let's get out this is something about this doesn't feel right he's protective he's upset about her but if we didn't know that story well she couldn't possibly know looking in it we see a story that perhaps you would want to tell about him which is this fierce protectiveness of this place this land right which is his and nobody else's in which he will and all of that is in the face but how you arrived at it was the marriage of accident and your vision and his emotionality to create a photograph is basically to plan everything that can be planned you know 100% 190% but to always leave some space for something to erupt if not there's no photograph isn't it always the accident that leads one to the best moment in one's life yes yes so this is very very thin line but I mean when I look at the photograph I really have a feeling that this could be one of the zealots of the time of bar corba or that's what comes to my mind but again I believe creating an image a good image is an image where enough space is left for the viewer to start their own storytelling his own journey the early photographs we looked at of the family and the palace hotel are much more limited palette and you can see you're moving from black and white into color but the color here to me is absolutely beautiful and I wonder whether you over the course of taking these I don't know where in the project this photograph was but of course that you began to sort of embrace color more yes yes but when you look at the images they are really there's I'm still the person who photograph in black and white all my life and it's like black and white but it's color but it's very monochromatic you know the intervals are very little and then I discovered that while I was photographing there was something deeper in me photograph than my will and there's this kind so at the end I find this kind of faithfulness to black and white I just go back to that one photograph that I skipped because I love it and I don't want to leave it one of the interesting things about you participating in this project which you weren't sure that you would do right I was sure at the beginning I would do it myself and then while spending a lot of time becoming the conductor by necessity of this big symphonic orchestra and making sure that everybody would play according to its core but most important everybody would play together which we only feel when we see the show now I mean we only Matt and I understood that we really got this orchestra to play when we saw it for the first time on the world you know when it started in Prague what I was going to say is that you are unique among this group in your relationship with Israel and it goes very very far back from you to the point where you are the only photographer here who could photograph neighbors yes these are your neighbors right and so you're coming at it from a slightly different perspective a closer one but also of course somebody who has always moved back and forth between Israel and the rest of the world you told me a wonderful story about these people which maybe you could share with the audience I mean they are my neighbors and usually on Shabbat I see them coming going out you know during the starting in May and they go with an umbrella the second person on the left has an umbrella and they go to the beach and I tried to take this photograph in their home I wanted a family portrait but the home was far too small I didn't have enough recue and I couldn't take this photograph and I say so let's try to go to see where they are going and then I explored several places where you know I could make the photograph and then the children are already working so you know it's a big undertaking and I wanted the weather to be good enough and the weather was like you know the gift that life makes you you know as Marie Bonaparte says work is easy what is truly difficult is grace and so here I was and this incredible you know sky no projected shadow and and it was very important for me it was late in the project and I really didn't have any oriental family I had mainly white Ashkenazine and I really wanted to have I mean I have it I photograph Ethiopians but I really wanted to have you know a middle class family his father came from Ur in Caldea, Ur-Kasdim in the late 30's and with a donkey and just you know this is part of the journey that I want to tell it's not here but there's maybe somewhere it is here or at least in my desire to have somewhere in the photograph an evocation of that and she's parents came from Morocco and as I may have told you before this is my waiting for Godot you know where are they coming from where are they going and I think that's somehow made one has that feeling of the and the eternal sense of waiting partly because you caught it at this moment where there are no shadows I've talked to you about this but we don't see there's no presence of time that if we had the shadows there we would feel that but there's something some they are in this place void of any reference to anything else but we can only judge by what they brought with them yeah you don't see I mean I could have chosen another vantage point and then we would see more of the behind and there's just sand and of course the symbolism of sand but also there's a road that you can see you know how the sand took over and maybe said I wanted sand because there's hardly any dunes left in Israel the immigration in the early 90s of Russian population the entire coast has been you know built all along you know from Tel Aviv to Ashdod and so I wanted to have the presence of sand for whatever reason I think also this story you told me about the presence of sand in trying to print these photographs that early on when you tried to print the palace photograph and I was at Thomas True's photograph that there was sand oh yeah we wanted to organize to have photographers process their film in Israel and we had a very good lab but after the first two months and people like Thomas True's had given had trusted me and and my negative his negatives were basically scratch with the particle of sands which were and then from that you know we decided to send the work first in London and then you know he did it himself in Düsseldorf and some did it in New York and yes yes this is you know Jerusalem is really the threshold of the desert the other thing that I love about this photograph is the sense of how each of these people have chosen their space apart from each other and you have this family portrait where it's again sort of beautiful choreography of their relationships which you told me they sort of you asked them to assemble themselves and this is how they decide this is how they fell out yeah I usually believe that people know to invest a space where they that they know better than I I may change a little you know move a little for you know the consideration plastic for graphical consideration but I try I let them first take the initial position the last photograph this is the one on which I could spend an hour so this is good because I'm sure somebody will show us you know a little panel five minutes I say I will not look at your panel we're getting the five minutes time but I but there is a lot to say about this and I want you to talk about it but what really one of the things I felt constantly in looking at your photographs and talking to you is something I think about a lot in my own work which is the limitations of our medium the struggle against what we want our work to say but we can't it's impossible for it to say for me one of the limitations of being a writer is having to work in solitude I always envy my friends like you or choreographers who can collaborate with other people and what the richness that that brings into the work for me I can go out into the world but at the end of the day it is always only me alone trying to produce the work for you one of the limitations which I find comes up a lot when you talk about your work is the inability to tell literally tell so much of the story which is also the beauty of the work that it is left that the photograph has to carry the weight and some things will not be transmitted and many things will some things you don't expect to be transmitted but with each of these photographs when I walked around the gallery with you I had the right early instinct which is not the photographer's instinct to say oh but the rest of the story the rest of the story is so good and how can you resist and how can you live with the rest of the story not being told and this photograph has a very rich story which I'd like you to talk about and you called it I think in your interview in the book of the show which was with the curator right? I think we'll see if I can find what you said about it you that it's a photograph it's one that you love and has many layers but it fails ultimately to express what you intended to say and I wanted to say I sort of not necessarily end with the notion of failure but maybe that's not a bad place to end since you're also in a nesting state of thinking about the next work and I think generally as an artist one moves from failure to failure this is a very important photograph my assistant who was here a few days ago was a former member of the Kibbutz Magan Michael Kibbutz in the north one of the richest Kibbutz in Israel and I wanted to have up until the very end of my project the Kibbutz was not represented and I said I want any major of the Kibbutz so we went to the Kibbutz and I met with a person who ran the local newspaper and she turned to be one of the, she was part of the last class in those children home which closed basically with this person who stood up so when she was up until she was 13 or 15 those this institution which has defined the Kibbutz basically those children home within the Kibbutz were created because of necessity there was no money it was easier for parents to have their children together in a home based by a few member of the Kibbutz and the parents could visit them one hour a day from 4 to 5 and they would sleep together they would I mean basically but very quickly what came out of a necessity became an ideological component of this and part of this Zionist dream it became a nightmare and you have today a generation of people who were in those children home not all but a part of this population who are still living after the trauma of this institution and people I have maybe some of the most poignant recie account of their journey and children today are asking why did our parents give us away they speak of eternal longing something incredible and among those four women here who are about 40 the woman here on the right was the one who made the entire institution of the children home collapse she was 6 years old and she ran at night under the rain and she described I mean this is I made a little film while being with them and it was just poignant and I spent about 6 months meeting with these women so basically one woman Shlomit in the second on the left took introduced me to few others and I had 6 months I wanted a photograph with 5 women because I believe that an even number provide a better construction of image and the fifth person was called by their friend the fortress never accepted what I thought I could get her to accept and then I ended up speaking with a woman in Munich who was in fact the souffre d'ouleur I don't know how you call that the person who was like bullied by the four others and I had long conversation with them but the entire idea was to photograph 4 women who have been sacrificed on the altar of Zionist socialist ideology and those are their words and it was an incredible journey I both met with them extensively each of them separately and together and one day I say let's spend a full day together and we'll make a photograph and so I arrive early in the morning and we had a wonderful breakfast and then of course I had an idea of where I would take the photograph but I went there and there was something which was not happening as I thought it would happen and we went back home and then you know we were already the time of the lunch I had planned also a photograph for the sunset going in a boat in the middle because they live in an incredible bay this is the most beautiful beach of Israel so this is the best I kept secret there's a beach in Magad Michael everybody can go and this is the most beautiful beach of Israel there's nobody and you can go there when you go to Israel but we didn't get to these photographs because we run late and around lunch they started to sit on the sofa and they were looking at photographs so I basically wanted to photograph their inner self I wanted to photograph this inner space I wanted to photograph something of their soul something of the trauma and that and then what happened was so beautiful I told my assistant let's move all the because the camera was not here I had planned to use a flash of that and we moved there and I had 20 photographs so I mean at that time I only left I think 8 photographs because of what I did previously and so I'm remembering now one of the words because we speak of failure this photograph is a story of a failure but among the many people who took part in this informal think tank which in for me and many of the photographers who met with them there was Miron Benvenisti a kind of iconic figure historian in Israel and he said at some point say and what if Israel would be a triumph or failure and do we judge an experiment with the result and I think and what is admirable people wanted to testify on this you know how those people have been sacrificed on the altar of an ideology this is what they wanted this is what I wanted so we well and what happened in this photograph is like you see those incredible plants which have grown you can see the feet you can see the present you can see life you see nothing of those you know of those people as they experience it like that and it make me think of this very famous say of Beckett I think it's ever lost ever failed fail again fail better I have a poster of that on my wall right before we came on stage Frederick read the truly brilliant review that just came out in the New York Times of this exhibition Mazel tov thank you and I wonder just we're going to be booted off the stage in a minute but I wonder after all of this I'm exhausted even thinking about this project 600 photographs 12 photographers the years and years of effort and thought that went into this what are you going to do next you should ask next what he is going to what next want to do with me what next will do for you thank you very much thank you quickly I'd like to let everybody know that we'll continue the second in this series of four conversations between this place artists and writers on Thursday March 31st at 7pm we'll have photographer Stephen Shore speaking to historian Ian Baruma hope you'll be able to join us thanks