From Galilee to the Negev

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Stephen Shore is a pioneering photographer and influential teacher. From Galilee to the Negev is an intimate portrait of a multi-faceted place, exploring the landscape of Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank; its complexities and its contradictions. Shore travelled the length and breadth of the region, questioning and revealing through his camera lens. His visual inquiry explores the landscape itself and the people who live in it – the daily lives and the narratives that combine to create this fascinating place – at once beautiful and ugly, safe and hostile. A selection of texts by a diverse range of writers – who have each selected one photograph as a spring board – will be interspersed amongst the photographs, offering a gathering of voices and perspectives.

By the age of 14, three of Stephen Shore’s photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As a teenager he spent time in Andy Warhol’s Factory photographing the artist and his entourage. In 1971 Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-person show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His photographs have since been included in numerous shows, including the ‘American Surfaces’exhibition (Cologne and Frankfurt, 1999) and the Tate Modern’s successful 2003 ‘Cruel and Tender’exhibition. Shore is a pioneering and highly influential photographer; he is also an important teacher and is Director of the Photography Program at Bard College, New York.

“Shore’s photographs in From Galilee to the Negev have all the hallmarks that have come to be associated with his images: the arresting formal structure, the deadpan humor, the cogent capturing of seemingly unremarkable visual details that our eyes usually pan over in everyday life. The book is a thoughtful and unexpected portrait of an area often approached only through its most obvious dichotomies.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

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