“We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.”—The Talmud

Israel: (Pre)occupation is an ongoing photo essay set predominantly against the Dead Sea. I’d been driven to shoot by the area's stark beauty and, especially, the unintentional theater of life of its mud baths, where Jew, Arab, Druize, and others gather together, despite politics, publicly dropping inhibitions and losing themselves in their own private worlds—and reflections. For me, this landscape and setting became the perfect mirror, metaphor, and backdrop against which I could observe the universal human tragicomedy and the specific psychodrama of the political conflict, where I could capture our unspoken relationship to one another—and to ourselves.