PUBLIC MARKS with tags photography & israel

He was born in France 55 years ago to descendants of Sephardic Jews from Algeria and Ashkenazi Jews from Russia. His parents survived World War II — his father in hiding and his mother with the resistance. He was raised in a secular, intellectual household but went to a religious high school when his parents embraced Judaism soon after the 1967 war.

Between November 2009 and January 2011, Slovakian photographer Martin Kollar spent extended periods of time working and living in Israel, building a photographic dossier on one of the most contentious geographical zones of modern history. Kollar’s past, a childhood spent behind the Iron Curtain, echoed unexpectedly during his time in Israel. The delineated territories of today’s Israel mirror the partition walls of Communist Czechoslovakia during ‘normalisation’. Random police searches and detentions piqued Kollar’s sense of constantly being under surveillance and the subject of suspicion.

Around ancient pools fed by thermal springs in Israel’s verdant Gan Hashlosha National Park, 11 of the men and women who have made some of the most compelling photographic images of the past 30 years are gathered to celebrate the final stages of a unique undertaking. Israel:Portrait of a Work in Progress is a temporary title but it reveals the ambition of the project’s instigator, 53-year-old French-Jewish photographer Frédéric Brenner.

Aerial I, production still from Shadow Sites II, 2011, Single channel digital video Courtesy the Artist, Rose Issa Projects and Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2011. Photography Adrian Warren

GAN HASHLOSHA NATIONAL PARK, Israel — The image is both idyllic and carefully staged: nearly a dozen foreign photographers, some of them celebrated on the international art scene, posing for a collective portrait on a sunny November morning against a startling green pool in this lush park in northern Israel.

Jungjin Lee's photo of Midreshet Ben-Gurion reveals her interpretation of the Land of Israel as a metaphor - as something that can be anywhere, she says.