Love Stories (Cuba, 1993-2008)

The confused and bewildering macho/militant versus homoerotic feeling in revolutionary Cuba evoked my own experience and past memories of growing up in a young Israel, macho and militarist.

Looking a bit “Latin”, speaking the local dialect and quickly adopting local body language, I somehow blended in with the locals, made friends, lived in their houses in the remote countryside, dined with their close family and socialized with their friends , constantly walking the thin line between observing and participating, gathering and documenting homoerotic experiences and secret love stories with my camera.

Promised Lands (Iceland, New York, London 2004-2006)

“The Promised Land” is a term I absorbed in my childhood, being a son of parents who returned from the Diaspora to start a new life in Israel. Later, through my explorations as a photographer and traveler, I discovered that each one of us has a “Promised Land” of his own or rather a collection of “Promised Lands”. These comprise encapsulated dreams, hopes and memories which form part of the psychological and mythical life of our imagination and aspiration.

Serial Landscapes (2003-Ongoing)

Cemeteries (2004-Ongoing)

For me, walking into a cemetery is like entering a library of sealed books which I will never be able to read. Each tombstone is a condensed silent energy of encapsulated emotions, memories and experiences that individual but also part of a collective emotional history. Sometimes the whole history of a town or even a nation can be revealed and re-lived in a trip to one cemetery.

According to the Jewish religion, each one dies twice – the first time is when he physically ceases to exist and the second time is when he/she ceases to exist in
the memory of the last remaining person.

Intimate Strangers (London, 2002-2005)

In November 2002, I moved from Tel Aviv to London and settled in Soho, the centre of its gay life. I was fascinated by the amount of “strangers” in a place where we were all “strangers”. Coming from Israel, I was a foreigner like so many others who came over from another country or another city. We are all foreigners among foreigners here - everyone you lay your eyes on is a mystery, an enigma.

Fragments of Life (Tel Aviv, 2001-2003)

In a series of staged images I lead the viewer into my world of memories, conflicts and trapped emotions. I recreated and reinvented fragments of my own life as an adolescent discovering his sexuality, growing up in a non-tolerant conservative society. For some of the images I even returned to the original Tel Aviv locations of my first encounters and revelations to recreate the magical moments.

Views (Israel, 2000-2001)

The thin line between homo-social and homo-erotic in army life can be so confusing and torturous for a gay soldier. Soldiers hug and kiss each other, say "I love you brother" to each other, sleep together - sometimes lean on each others' chests, sometimes share a tiny mattress, have communal showers where they play "boy games" like throwing water and soap on each other, sometimes share a hot shower, sometimes masturbate together.

The Metaphysical City (1993-2000)

During my first travels I tried to capture the physical iconic identity of the cities and places which I visited. At a later stage, on returning to the same places, those iconic images gradually began to blur, and I found myself searching for a different, metaphysical, dimension where space and time turn into emotion, where a collective experience turns into a private one, and the physical and sensual dimension turn into a psychological, metaphoric and spiritual one.