The magazine of the photo-essay
Jan 2018 back issue
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Daniel Tchetchik
“The next day, he woke me up at 4:30 in the morning to watch the sun rise over the
Sea of Galilee — the most beautiful sunrise in the world, he assured me. We sat on
the shore and waited. At five o’clock, the sun came up. by 5:15, it was trying to kill
me; at 5:30, it succeeded, and I’ve been dead ever since.” - Meir Shalev (‘Sunburn’
artist book, Kehrer Verlag 2015)
Sunburn is a book featuring a series of photographs about the interplay
between a specific and imaginary place. A place so hot, some may call it home
while others might call it hell. This is just one of the many paradoxes associated
with living in the Middle East. The series in question is a visual display of tensions
and contradictions: the desert and the sea, the local and the global, the familiar
and the uncanny, the politically charged narrative and the poetic narrative, the
digital image and the materiality of analog photography. By showing both the
visible and the hidden underneath the omnipresence of the burning Middle-
eastern sun, Sunburn is ultimately an exploration of what photography is capable
of in the context of extreme climatic and sociopolitical circumstances.
