Installation View, Tel Aviv Artists Studios, 2023
Earth retraces the footsteps of generations of photographers who sought to capture the Israeli landscape in its full splendor and scarcity. Collaborating with Noa Kalagsblad, Dagan explores the role of landscape photography as a form of territorial marking, the tension between male and female gaze, and the space between the sublime and the mundane.
The project began during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the artists searched for open landscapes and an endless horizon amid restriction and uncertainty. They revisited the iconic works of Ansel Adams and Group f/64, whose images of the American West offered hope during the Great Depression and reshaped the role of photography as both aesthetic and existential documentation.
Dagan and Kalagsblad chose to photograph in locations strongly associated with male Israeli photographers. Shooting in the peak of summer under harsh sunlight, they engaged with a visual memory shaped by masculinity - striking, assertive, unyielding. Their diptychs add interpretation and question power structures between humans and nature, men and women, photographer and subject.
The search for an open landscape led the artists to "create" the vistas they longed for. The absence of monumental natural abundance and the compressed geography of Israel drove them to construct panoramic images from multiple square-format photographs taken at different locations and times. These visual manipulations disrupt the documentary premise of classic landscape photography.
The result is a "new Israeli landscape" - an alternative earth detached from time, place, or stable perspective. A landscape that is both familiar and imagined, a country rebuilt from fragments, longing, and the photographic act itself.
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 200×110 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 90×90 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 200×110 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 200×110 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 90×90 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 90×90 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 50×50 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 50×50 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 90×90 cm, 2020–2023
Untitled, Inkjet Print, 90×90 cm, 2020–2023
Installation View, Tel Aviv Artists Studios, 2023
Installation View, Tel Aviv Artists Studios, 2023
Installation View, Tel Aviv Artists Studios, 2023