FIELD TRIP by Martin Kollar

Description:

Martin Kollar2009112011112This PlaceLEICA OSKAR BARNACK AWARD 2014

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.Kollars past, a childhood spent behind the Iron Curtain, echoed unexpectedly during his time in Israel. The delineated territories of todays Israel mirror the partition walls of Communist Czechoslovakia during normalisation. Random police searches and detentions piqued Kollars sense of constantly being under surveillance and the subject of suspicion.Field Trip establishes an opaque representation of the life and landscape of Israel. Military presence looms heavily and the images are punctuated with anxiety. Butchered animals combine with uncertain portraits of Israeli residents and leave the viewer unclear where the military landscape ends and the civilian land begins.The work in Field Trip is just that the result of a trip, an investigative and inquisitive one, tinged with paranoia, the result being a beautiful, stark, often humorous and complex photographic diary of a well-trodden land. This traumatic album epitomizes frontline photography.