Roei Greenberg
ALONG THE BREAK | “I focus on places where geography and history meet and create a complex photographic perspective; pictorial and laced with empathy on one hand, yet tinged with irony and underlying ideological tones on the other. This emotional duality runs through the works, sews them together and forms a unique point of view; an ongoing dialogue between the ordinary and the sublime.”
The Great Rift Valley is a continuous geographic trench caused 35 million years ago by movement of tectonic plates and runs from Lebanon's Beqaa Valley to Mozambique in South Eastern Africa.This topographic phenomenon which crosses contemporary Israel is known in Hebrew as the 'Syrian-African break'. En route, it carves out the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea and shapes the physical borders of Israel; with Lebanon and Syria in the north, with Jordan along the eastern front and with Egypt in the south.
Although the break (shever) is used to describe the physical features of the phenomenon, I use it as a platform for my conceptual journey. This body of work offers a poetic framework, geographically confined while confronting the BREAK as a metaphor of the ideological and social crisis that this local landscape represents. I take the idea of the American photographic road trip, the endless roads and vast open spaces, and import that notion into the small, restricted, Israeli territory. Using a large format camera, I reorganize the materials of reality into an alternative entity and transform the relics into www.roeigreenbergphotography.com
