Clean Up History

Series statement

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Clean Up History is a series about disappearance. It was made at ancient sites in Israel: walls above the sea, a stair cut into rock, columns standing in an empty court, a fortress on a bare ridge. Each of these places was once full of people. The people are gone, and the stones that outlived them are slowly going too, worn down by wind, sea and time.

A photograph is supposed to stop this. It holds a place as it was on one afternoon and promises to keep it. In these images the promise breaks. Each frame begins as a straight record of the site, and then the image itself starts to fail: rows of pixels run down the frame in long streaks, colours turn into their negatives, stone stretches into bands of light. The picture that was meant to save the ruin disappears in the same way the ruin does.

The title borrows the language of software, the command that erases a record in one click. History does not vanish that quickly, but it does vanish, and so do we. The sequence moves between the ruins and the people who still pass through them: a crowd crossing a city square in front of glass that will be dug up in its turn, a figure carved in stone that has stood in an empty arcade longer than any of us will, a tower that is nearly gone. The same streaks run through all of them, so the visitors fade with the stones, private lives along with public ones.

Photography can rescue a moment from disappearing, but only for a while. Prints fade, files corrupt, archives are lost, and the people who remember what an image shows are gone too. These photographs are made from inside that double truth: the camera saves, and what it saves is also temporary.

I was born in Dudinka in northern Russia and came to Israel at eighteen. Standing among stones that have outlived several empires, I wanted to make pictures that admit they will not last either.