Along the Break

​“The Great Rift Valley is a continuous trench caused 35 million years ago by movement of tectonic plates and runs from Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley to Mozambique in South Eastern Africa… Although the break (shever) is used to describe the physical features of the phenomenon, I use it as platform for my conceptual journey….Confronting the BREAK as a metaphor of the ideological and social crisis the landscape represents” – Roei Greenberg

This was one of my favorite projects that I came across while judging Critical Mass this past year. One of the things I appreciate about this project is how Greenberg has an open and nuanced way of drawing the viewer into a subject that could have be shown with a much heavier hand. His journey along this physical and metaphorical divide creates a not only a portrait of the landscape, but also of the social and political forces it represents. Greenberg’s journey moves through fields as the seasons change. His images carry us through farm lands and roadcuts, to a rusted syrian tank left in the middle of an idyllic forest stream. Images of watchtowers act as punctuation marks throughout the series. Aesthetically, Greenberg’s compositions are satisfyingly clean and formal. At the same time, he fills the frame with subtle gradations of color and texture in a way that gives them an unexpected fullness.

- Mia D.

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