Anat Icar Shoham

For over a year, I have documented the perimeter zones near Beit Hanoun and Gaza City, which form a closed military buffer area under continuous destruction. Working from two fixed observation points, I use telephoto lenses at their optical limits to photograph a landscape visible only from afar, building a visual archive of erasure over time.
I see this landscape not as static terrain but as a living, metabolic system reshaped by cycles of destruction and accumulation. By returning repeatedly to the same coordinates, I trace the perimeter as an organism in constant transformation: earth, debris, and dust dispersing, settling, and reconfiguring. Moments of bombardment appear as monumental apparitions, with plumes of smoke and debris recalling Goya’s Colossus, a monstrous figure looming over devastation. Dust and haze act as material agents of erasure, veiling the boundary between the visible and the unspeakable.
The images dwell in the collapse of the digital grain itself: pixels disintegrate as structures collapse. Atmospheric distortion, winter shadows, and optical noise function as both concealment and exposure, forming a testimony in which the metabolism of ruin consumes architecture and photograph alike. Yet amid human absence, fragile material life persists shifting dust, faint light, and the tremor of matter. I return to these coordinates with cautious hope that one day this documentation will extend beyond destruction to witness reconstruction.

Website www.anaticarshoham.com

Collective or Agency Grosso Modo