Salt & Pepper

Like a filmstrip set in high-speed motion, Israel’s rapidly changing landscape is hard to focus on. It is a challenge to pin down, to grasp, and to make sense of. This can be discouraging to someone who is interested in understanding Israel. The country’s erratic, ungraspable visual nature is a metaphor for one’s own inability to examine oneself – although you would expect to know yourself better than anyone, it is often an outsider that exposes those truths that you were blind to. It’s impossible to see your own face. You need something external – a reflection in water, a mirror, or a photograph.. With its complexities, Israel sometimes cannot see its own face. It needs an outsider of sorts, with a camera, capturing those true images. Shlomi Amiga is such an outsider. Shlomi grew up in Israel but has lived in Canada since 2009. Usually, his new home would not matter so much to the task of photographing Israel, but in this rare case it does. This is because Canada in many ways is as opposite from Israel as any country could be. In a sense, Canada and Israel are mirror images of each other. Canada is vast, Israel tiny. Canada is cold, Israel hot. Canada can choose if it should go to war, Israel is constantly at war – whether it chooses to be or not. Canada is reserved, not in your face, gives you room, leaves you alone. Israel does not.

Text by Yaniv Hason