Tel Aviv 1997

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I photographed Tel Aviv in 1996–97, several years after completing my studies at Bezalel and shortly before leaving Israel for the Netherlands. Rather than photographing the city through its familiar image of white modernist architecture, I was drawn to places where this image seemed to come apart: aging façades, improvised entrances, empty lots, construction sites, rooftops, parking areas and fragments of public space.

Tel Aviv was conceived as a modern city built on sand, carrying with it an aspiration toward Europe and toward a new social and national future. By the late 1990s, however, this promise was visible less as a coherent architectural vision than as a collection of accumulated adaptations. Buildings had been altered, surfaces repaired, structures demolished and replaced, vegetation and infrastructure inserted wherever necessary.

I was interested in this discrepancy between the city as an idea and the city as something inhabited. The photographs do not attempt to document Tel Aviv comprehensively. Instead, they form a provisional lexicon of details through which the city reveals the instability of its own image.

Seen from my position at the time, Tel Aviv was also a place whose familiarity was becoming uncertain. Having immigrated to Israel as a child, I had grown up within the narratives of the country and its modernity, while remaining attentive to the distance between those narratives and everyday experience. Photographing the city became a way of examining that distance.

The series anticipates a question that would continue through my later work: how architecture, museums and other constructed environments give physical form to collective narratives—and what becomes visible when those narratives begin to crack.